A Non-Existant Mutie is an Even Better Mutie

I think I made two mistakes in the previous blog post.

1. The modified .223 pistol takes 5 actions points to use and 6 for aiming. When I wrote that it takes one less action point to use I was thinking about Gizmo's gun that only needed 4. Unfortunately I had to sell Gizmo's gun because I couldn't find more ammo for it.
2. Leather jacket and leather armor are different clothes. I think I wrote that I put on a leather armor to get Dogmeat, but it was a leather jacket, the Mad Max clothes.

Well, Overseer commands and I follow. At least I get to kill more mutants.
Since I have no clue where to go kill the muties I decide to go see the Brotherhood. When in doubt, ask the technologically advanced military force that might want to know about a super mutant uprising anyway. Unfortunately the guys won't let me in because I'm not a member of the club, and in order to join I must retrieve something from somewhere down south. I don't recall them saying anything else so I go south to see if green dots appear on my map. They don't, so I go to Boneyard to see if there's something to do there.

Boneyard, or Ade...Ay... something, I forgot already. Boneyard's good enough.
A little village with lots of men in armor and sad people walking about. I'm told to go talk to some guy named Zimmerman for work, and Zimmerman asks me right away if I'm used to killing bad people. I tell him yes, and he tells me that some raider group just north of our current location is attacking the town and generally being a nuisance, killing people and kidnapping children, and that I must go and kill their leader. I go do the job immediately, except that some of the dialogue options the game gave me in the previous chat made me suspicious about this quest's true colours and I instead approach the "gang" leader, a hot girlie named Razor, peacefully instead of guns blazing. She informs me that it's not them who's evil, it's the Regulators in Boneyard. They're keeping the parents hostage or something and they killed Zimmerman's son because the kid found about the Regulator's true intentions. I'm told these "Blades", Razor's group, would try to take the town by force if they had guns, but some Deathclaw's prevent them from dealing with a local group called Gun Runners. I offer to go see the Gun Runners AND take the evidence of the Regulators' evil deeds to Zimmerman.
Reaching the Gun Runners is no big deal, the two Deathclaws that prevent the Blades and Runners from getting together are so far away that I can run through the screen. The Runner leader whines about the Deathclaws and says that if I manage to kill them all either I or my friends the Blades will get all the guns and ammunition needed. Oh, bugger. Deathclaws. I'd rather take all the Regulators on by myself than try to take out a single Deathclaw. With some reloading I do manage to finally kill the two Deathclaws, though, but the Gun Runner head honcho isn't too pleased. He says that Deathclaw's keep always coming back and that we should wait and see before getting excited about a few kills, and sure enough two more Deathclaws had appeared. I don't try fighting them, I just reload a save from right after killing the first two and run around looking for a way underground. After 20 minutes spent on this one empty map I give in and consult The Vault, which talks about an underground lair with eggs. Well, duh! I figured out that much myself. Could you give me some directions? Manhole or ladder, which corner... No? Well fuck you and your guides again. Why is it that every time I look online for help for any game, which isn't often I might add, I never get any? Am I playing the wrong games?

Well, I find a staircase on my own eventually. The problem was that it's so dark that it looked like a regular bit of ground, and the other cracks on the streets and what-not distracted me. Anyway, downstairs I find a Deathclaw mother that is admittedly more powerful than the regular Deathclaws but still falls down faster due to me just blindly rushing it and aiming at her eyes. A few Finesse criticals later she's not only blind but also missing her head and half of her torso. I destroy the eggs and the Gun Runner man is happy to send some guns Blades' way. I go talk to Razor and she's happy too, and ready to go kick some Regulator ass. I say that I'll first go see Zimmerman, just in case the Boneyard civilians side with the Regulators without proof of them being the enemy. Zimmerman cries, and dies when a Regulator behind him shoots him. It's on now!

The Blades attack at that moment and all hell breaks loose. It's literally the largest and most fun battle I have ever witnessed in the Fallout series so far, with Blades and civilians doing their best to kill the Regulators around the town. I get to kill about 5-6 guys myself, 3 inside the Zimmerman house and some more across the street from there through the windows. Battles are really more fun now that I know about windows. I honestly didn't know you could see/shoot through windows in Fallout games until one early fight in this game when a raider shot me through a window.
After the long battle all Regulators are dead and everybody loves me. I collect the caps, the ammo, the stimpaks and even a sniper rifle from the bodies. I sell/trade away all my other weapons and ammo except for the .223 pistol and the sniper rifle because they're my best weapons, use the same exact ammo type saving me some inventory space and they differ in range so there's actually a point in holding two guns. Using two short range weapons with different ammo types is just dumb if the other would end up being superior and thus more useful.
With another town done as far as I'm concerned I go check out The Vault wiki for one last time, this time to see what the hell and where the hell it is that the Brotherhood wants me to find, and for once I do get valuable information. A holodisk in Glow. God damn Glow in the God damn far south-east. Someone working on Fallout actually once thought that a vague clue about south would somehow get the player to go to the south-east corner of the map? And this isn't the last time the hinted direction is going to be crap in this game. This is all just confusing bullshit and I quit!
No I don't.

Glow.
A literal hole in the ground. I tie a rope around a beam and go down the hole to the first floor. There's heavy radiation everywhere but as soon as I find some Rad-X from a locker I take some RadAway and the Rad-X and successfully fight the radiation. I find a holodisk on a dead Brother and head back to the Brotherhood with it and a yellow keycard that I don't think I'll ever actually use in this run.
Up till this point the game has thrown very few random encounters in the wasteland, but after leaving Glow and heading to Boneyard they begin occurring as often as they did in the beginning of Fallout 2. I fight mole rats, radscorpions, mobsters and such, I see a giant footprint and a Stealth Boy, a police box and a motion sensor, a crashed alien ship and an alien blaster, an overturned truck with 5700 caps, a singing Patrick, loads of Brotherhood patrols, some super mutant patrols and even one savage battle between a large group of the Brotherhood and a large group of bandits that ends for me in my considerably gruesome death with all my limbs flying in different directions. Of course some of these happen later on after some more quest points, but I just pointed them all out this one time so I don't have to try and individually mention each of them as they happen.

I get to Boneyard and sell some crap away and buy some crap in. I also meet Katja, another NPC companion who joins me and Dogmeat.
In the Brotherhood I become an initiate for a job well done and get some free gear, an advanced combat armor and three boxes of ammunition of my own choosing, which is of course .223 FMJ. Carrying nearly 2000 bullets now, that's several hundred ounces of death to deliver.
The Elders of the Brotherhood have heard rumours of odd army patrols heading north but don't believe the reports themselves. They want me, the new boy, to go check things out and see if there's anything up there because I'm nobody's friend and have no reason to spread other people's lies. Well, I can safely say there sure as hell isn't anything interesting directly up north, but if you just give up and go all the way to the north-west corner you'll find an army base full of super mutants. Bullshit directions, but I don't get too mad because I remember once long time ago seeing a speedrun of Fallout where the guy went to this corner before I stopped watching, so after the Glow incident I had a sort of a hunch that that's where I should go now.
I report back about the super mutant military base and suggest attacking it with a small and stealthy group, and the Elders listen to me. On my way to the military base again Dogmeat finally dies at the hands of a super mutant patrol. I don't mean to say that like I was eagerly awaiting it to happen, it's just that considering how weak it was and how often it went in solo I'm surprised it lasted this long. It did die once or twice before, but then I died too and had to reload.
May I also mention that super mutie patrols are laughable. I beat them with general ease, but mostly only because the weakling mutie always sprays bullets so wide that the OTHER muties die while I go unhurt. After Brutus is done stabbing his pals in the back I kill him with two shots in the eyes or one lucky shot from the alien blaster. I have low energy weapon skill, that's why I need luck with the blaster shots, but in Fallout it still works better than in Fallout 2 with the same skill level.

At the military base me and Katja meet up with the Brothers and I begin combat with one mutie at a time. I beat some alone and the Brotherhood boys help out with a couple further away, although one Brother ends up killing Katja. Well, we all make mistakes and I'm not one to cry for her. I did give her a free sub-machine gun and ammo, though, which I can't pick up since I carry too much stuff already. A bit of a waste of money there... oh, well.
I get inside the base with the help from a code in an enemy holodisk, but the Brothers stay out. The base has some security but oddly nobody's standing between me and the very sensitive areas, and the red forcefields are so broken that I can pass through them with some damage taken. I get to the third floor and overhear a conversation regarding my sweet Vault 13. These bastards are going to die if they mess with my homies.

I find a control room of sorts with a bunch of scaredy-cat robe-dudes pleading for mercy. Alright, just this once I won't go insane and kill you, but if Vault 13 is empty when I get back in there then you better hope those robes are from the Fallout 2 bridge guardians.
I dabble with Science and Repair on the only important looking computer and end up seeing a list of random security codes and a possiblity to hack the thing. Random hacking with my skills is probably a bad idea if Fallout 2 has taught me anything, so I just press a random code. Nothing happens, what is... wait, something is counting down in my little message box. 270 seconds left. 270 seconds left to what? What is this? I think I should stand here and see what happens when it reaches zero-- and fuck I do, I just run. Epic running away moment follows and once I get to the world map with my Brothers I get a nice cutscene of something blowing up. I'm guessing I just finished Vault 13 quest number... well, the other one. No more super mutants.
I wander back to the Brotherhood to find some clues to Master's whereabouts, a promotion, new gear or SOMETHING, but I get nothing. A pat on the back. I did all of your jobs from recognizing the enemy threat to neutralizing it and I'm still not good enough to become a full-fledged drinking partner or at least get the good gear? Where's my tin can suit? Hell, they don't even hand out anymore ammo to the hero of the wasteland, just tell me to work with what I've got now. Crap. I suppose I'll hang around and loot the place or something. Nobody not rewards Johnny 13 and lives.

Don't worry though, I know where the Master is and I think I got the location from Katja before she died (if I didn't reload a save after I did it). Only time the Ask About feature has been useful so far, the people in Fallout don't even know anything about their own faction. Stupid Elders.

Oh, and sometime after the Deathclaw incident in Boneyard I leveled up and chose the perk for Faster Shot and now firing guns costs one AP less, allowing me to annihilate things and people. Fun.