With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

We say First Nations in Canada. so close enough it sounds like it.

 

How so?

No, it wasn't a prototype Vault, it was a Vault set up to run an experiment.

Thank you, corrected.

Yes, but that path assumes that you're living in Oklahoma and at this point a lot of opportunities to grind relationship points have already passed by.

I haven't played it either, but as I understand it the player character merges with the other mutants to become a new Master. As such, they never become a courier and Fallout: New Vegas is a very different game.

 

Not... Exactly. Some ghouls go 'feral' and lose their capacity for higher reasoning. But two hundred years after the war, virtually all of the ones you meet are going to just be regular-crazy or have adapted to their new life. And they're not exactly undead, just... Changed.

It's more that everyone else uses it as their dump stat. In Old World Blues it literally doesn't occur to the Texas Brotherhood to negotiate with one of their neighbours until Mr. Entertainment suggests it.

Hayes wants to rebuild America and the advanced society that existed pre-War. He'd feel more comfortable if the leader of an American state was called a Governor, but he's not fixated on the idea.

That's what happens if the super mutants win in Fallout: New California. Their civilisation gains a focus it hasn't had since the Master died and FEV enhanced species conquer the world.

Yeah. Someone shot him in the head.

 

Most of them were sold on being bomb shelters, but the company was more then a little crazy, and turned a large number of them into petri dishes for some mad science. Those that actually worked normally were just the control groups for the weird ones.

Highlights include:
Vault 12 - Doors not closing during the war, just to test radiation on the people inside, leading to mutation into 'Ghouls'
Vault 13 - Intended to stay sealed for 200 years, to test isolation. Water purification system broke down
Vault 34 - Stuffed full of guns and no population control methods. Armed Riots cracked its power plant open and irradiated the people inside.
Vault 87 - Human testing of Forced Evolution Virus. Super Mutant creation center.
Vault 95 - Drug Addict Rehab Vault, that after treatment supplied the whole population with drugs. Population overdosed or murdered each other.
Vault 112 - Think 'the matrix'. Full VR system for a virtual utopia, Overseer went mad and used it to torture the population for shits and giggles.

Edit: League of Shadow'ed by Zoat himself.

 

If you were really, really luck, or exceptionally important, a Vault was a functionally self-sufficient nuclear bunker that could, supposedly, take direct nuclear strikes to its front door and remain intact. Something that would require whoever was assaulting it to tunnel through multiple meters of soil and stone just so they could drop a hundred or so kilotons of warhead to enter unauthorized.

If you weren't either of those things then they were dystopian hell scapes masquerading as social experiments, and making the horrors of Nazi concentration camps look pleasant by comparison.

One example of how messed up they could was Vault 11, where the Overseer (basically a president over their Vault) was to be sacrificed yearly so that the rest of the residents weren't killed themselves. This process gradually broke the people of Vault 11, with them turning mostly bitter and hateful to each other as time progressed, the position of Overseer rapidly turning from on of authority to the spot you wanted your most hated enemy.

Eventually the Vault is whittled down to just a few (around three or four I think) people who, despite everything, actually viewed each other as people they could get along with, friends even, (I could be misremembering that bit) and they decided to just refuse to appoint a new Overseer, choosing instead to die on their own terms and commit suicide.

The player only learns all of this through terminal entries however, the Vault long since empty when they (Courier 6) arrives.

But do you want to know the worst part?

None of that had to happen.

As you explore the Vault you eventually come across a holotape that congratulates the last few survivors, who had simply refused to allow the Vault's computer to kill anyone else by this point, on their defiance of this system, telling them that they were now free to go and live their lives outside of the Vault.

And if memory serves, this isn't even the worst Vault.

You can check out the full(-ish) story here if you're interested. (Because I almost certainly got something wrong in this.)

 

Vault-Tech: a corporation with a lot of government ties. Presented Vaults as a way to save the population, in reality ran horrifying social experiments (on the premise of learning how the post-war civilization will function, or something) on the citizens: with only a fraction of a fraction surviving all the tribulations and emerging into wastelands.
Vaults ranged from "mega-door doesn't close to the end, radiation seeps freely in" and "all people inside are cryogenically frozen without their knowledge" to "1000 men to 1 woman resident ratio". Also there were a few "control Vaults" that went largely the way they were advertised at.

...Define "zombies".

There was a nasty plague before the Great War, called "The New Plague".
It fucked. Shit. Up. On top of already huge problems with resource scarcity.
So there was devised a counter to it - the thing ended up being F.E.V. Forced Evolution Virus.
It is what makes humans into Supermutants (less genetical defects = better supermutant transformation, ergo why Vault people were prime subjects in F1)

But as nukes went out, and a lot of F.E.V. and radiation both were released out into the wastelands, a curious interaction was foind: when minor dose of F.E.V. (basically every wastelander out there not straight outta Vault, having lived generations out there) and a lot of radiation interact, the person has a chance to not straight up die, but end up Ghoulified.

Think Zombies, but run on magical radiation-juice, healing when next to a source of it, and shit.
If there is too much radiation, then end up Feral, those are zombies for all intents and purposes.
Non-ferals are still people though, with many having been there as far back as before the war that happened hundreds if years ago, keeping most/all memories and skills.

 

There is a lot to be said about the mod: more good than bad, at that - but the endings were generally the weaker part as far as most are concerned.

The one in question, however, is the "non-standard bad end" one can get as far as halfway through.
Kinda like agreeing to help Elijah at the end of Dead Money, or (much closer) F1's Supermutand Bad End.

New Vegas straight-up doesn't happen in the case of Star Player merging their alien-parasite-based infinitely-regenerating symbiote essence with the local Master wannabe.
...The cinematic is clear enough as to why.

Btw, I absolutely adore the cinematics of the endings, those were masterfully made for each and every of the many many endings.
ranging from "Okay, that's plausible enough backstory for the Courier (Senator stuff) to "Well, that's fanfic-ey, alroight", but great nevertheless.

 

So Oklahoma is it's own state? An NCR equivalent?

Actually, it borders Colorado, which means Cheyenne Mountain which means the Calculator

A supercomputer controlled by a psychic SI brain...

Probably a bit too radical, but that would make for an interesting SI

 

And then there's Vaul 77...

That's canon, by the way.

Calculator woke up in 2196, so at this point was destroyed about eighty years ago. Vault 0 is still there, and in the game WARDEN is able to access it, but I don't think it's mentioned otherwise.

 

Why choose that ending if you don't mind me asking? Was it so you could write a fallout protag as a antagonist Krono could fight or something? If so interesting idea

 

No, it's because there's no video of Cerberus and that was the closest thing I could find. If that ending had happened in the Krono timeline then he would have already been fighting super mutants. Or (more likely) fled America.

The Fallout: Old World Blues approach to game protagonists is that they're around but nothing like as significant as they are in the games. And to be fair, the protagonist of Fallout 3 doesn't really do much.

 

Yeah. In OWB, Courier Six still exists . . . but they aren't The Courier.

And it wouldn't stop the machinegun armor regardless, but the Legion does actually reinforce the football pad armor with metal and the like. Not that the armor worn by NCR troopers would stop machinegun armor either.

Oh, and to someone wondering if Kronos might seek his own Nguyen . . . Well . . . Can't say I'd blame him. Most of the women who can end up in charge of nations in the OWB mod are ridiculously hot.

========

And just for a quick bit on ghouls.

In Fallout, for whatever reason, not everyone dies when exposed to lethal amounts of radiation. Sometimes they will instead mutate into a ghoul. This causes things like their skin to flake off, for their hair to usually (but not always) fall out, and other such things that ultimately make them look like rotting corpses. Though it's important to note that they aren't actually rotting, so you don't have to worry about the smell of rotten meat while in their presence.

So, no, they aren't actually zombies. They're just mutated humans who happen to look like zombies.

The mutation does have its benefits. Despite their zombie appearance, they're actually highly regenerative in a way normal humans aren't. Not in the sense of regrowing limbs or anything, but they heal at an accelerated rate and can seemingly live an indefinite period of time as no ghoul has ever died of old age. Of course, they're also "squishier" than normal humans. So it's this funny situation where they heal more easily but are also easier to injure.

They also have a special relationship with radiation. Ghouls are seemingly (this is important) immune to radiation in that they don't have to worry about dying of radiation poisoning. In fact, exposing themselves to radiation actually makes them heal even faster. Some ghouls will even transform even further into a glowing one, which is basically just a ghoul that is so radioactive it's glow in the dark green. (Also, ghouls have said that radiation has a pleasant warmth to it.)

However, not every person who turns into a ghoul manages to retain their sanity. Many ghouls end up suffering from a form of mental degeneration that turns them feral. Feral ghouls are effectively mindless and consumed by a ravenous hunger that makes them act like zombies. Specifically, they act like "fast" zombies and tend to hunt in packs. Some people will turn feral immediately, others will only turn over a period of months or years. One thing that is interesting to note is that the games have actually shown images of what a feral ghoul's brain looks like, and the images are remarkably similar to what happens in extremely advanced cases of Alzheimer's.

Another thing to note is that, eventually, every single ghoul will go feral. The rate at which it will happen varies widely, and some people are significantly more resistant than others, but it will happen. The two primary factors in inducing feralness, or staving it off, are radiation and socialization.

Just staying actively involved in social activities, or really keeping yourself mentally engaged in general, can help to hold off the process of becoming feral. Not indefinitely, but it helps.

Another thing that helps is staying the fuck away from radiation. While for the most part it will heal a ghoul's body, even help to sustain it, the ghoul isn't 100% immune to radiation. While much of their flesh benefits, the brain of a ghoul is merely resistant to radiation. Continued and prolonged exposure to radiation will accelerate the mental degradation that leads to becoming feral. (An interesting thing to note is that while normal ghouls aren't radioactive, feral ghouls are in fact radioactive.)

Now, again, when someone becomes feral can vary. There are ghouls that have lived over 200 years without going feral. Hell, there has been at least one intelligent glowing one. Though it's important to note intelligent ghouls don't typically live in radioactive areas. Some ghouls are just more resistant to going feral than others, but all ghouls eventually will go feral if they live for long enough.

Feralness is also why most ghouls are subject to being treated poorly by normal humans.

As an aside, there actually are people out there that are completely and utterly immune to the effects of radiation. The ones that have been seen are members of a cult called the Children of the Atom, and they literally worship radiation.

=========

As for Fallout: New California . . . I really fucking hate the Enclave ending for that mod.

I wish it'd just been another bad ending where the Enclave purges the Wastelands or something instead of having the future Courier get his ass kicked by the Lone Wanderer and the Brotherhood of Steel. This despite the mod having you, and two other characters, being effectively unkillable super soldiers. Plus the additional Enclave reinforcements the three of you bring to the Capital Wasteland.

If anyone should have gotten the shit kicked out of them, it'd be the Lone Wanderer and the Brotherhood.

 

Ah, Fallout has their own Nemesis.

 

Not everything is a Nemesis plot.

 

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Ana

 

okay its been so long i have forgotten but why do you hate the new stuff again?

 

Resident Evil Nemesis.

 

Thank you, corrected.

I don't believe this is correct.

Amazons being a culture of murders and rapists is the biggest 'what the heck were they thinking' thing, but I liked the post-Crisis setting.

 

While I also didn't like what they did with the Amazons, I have to admit that it may have been more close to what the mythological Amazons were like.

The ancient world was not a pleasant place, and its people were not pleasant, and in the myths the Amazons were said to kill their male children, like the n52 Amazons did before they gave them to Hephaestus, and just saw males as breeding stock, and if I remember correctly they also worshipped Ares, like the n52 Amazons, who had a better relationship with Ares, and the guy was one of Diana's trainers.

 

Actual Amaz-? What?

The entirely fictional Amazons in DC had a particular character. What they did is like retconing Bruce Wayne to having shot his own parents.

 

Changed it, but I still think it was more in line with their mythological inspiration.

 

If a writer wants to write an entirely different character, I would encourage them to do so.

 

Though you seem to be pissed at the n52, even though you yourself have changed things from canon.

Granted your main universe is set in the Young Justice cartoon, which is fairly light compared to the rest of the DC universe in terms of content and world building, so I guess it's not quite as big as the changes the n52 made.

 

I left the characters in-character to the best of my ability. I don't mind them rejigging history a little to make things line up. I resent the sort of bastardisation that the Nu52 is based on.

 

Fair enough.

And I can see how you changed some of the history, but not the personalities.

Even though you changed it so that Komand'r didn't betray her people and torture her sister for pettiness, you did leave a lot of her resentful and power hungry personality from the pre Flashpoint comics.

You also left Grayven as a conquering warlord, whose personality may be largely the same as in the comics, I don't remember him all that much, even though in the comics he was kinda interested in conquering Apokalips and gaining the approval of his father, as well as just being someone that was sired on some random woman instead of Mortala.

Though I think you changed Mortala personality wise, since if I remember correctly in the comics she was evil and fully corrupted by her time on Apokalips and wasn't anywhere near as easily scared and cowed as this stories version.

You also left the Psions as being a race of sadistic bastards, even though you changed it so that every Psion is like that instead of just the males.

 

That comes from one relatively recent comic. It's about as core to their identity as the Starheart being evil is to Alan's.

 

I have to agree with Zoat here.

The Amazons of DC have an established history. They are not the Amazons of myth. Just like Marvel's Thor isnt a redhead.

The New 52 completely perverted the story of Wonder Woman. The Lasso isnt used as much, she is focused on as a warrior instead of a peacebringer. They make Ares her mentor. And the Amazons are child killers.

If Azarello wanted to tell his own story with his own character, fine. But that isnt Wonder Woman and it isnt the Amazons.

 

DC's Nu52 and Marvel's Ultimates are, to me, a sort of late onset dark age of comics-itis.

The Dark Age of comics came out after The Watchmen, and The Dark Knight Returns came out to great success. Those were different from main stream comics at the time, and everyone jumped on the bandwagon. The thing is, they were popular as a change of pace from the norm, not as a full on replacement. But the industry saw money in it so everything had to be like those, no matter how little they actually resembled those stories.

Everything needed to be grimdark, because for some reason comic book characters needed to be horribly flawed, warped caricatures of themselves was the hip thing to do. I have no idea why they felt the need to once more toss the baby out with the bathwater and reboot things to bring in new readers. The Reboots are always 'we want young comic readers to be able to enjoy our stories without having to understand 20+ years of history'.

But that's the thing, you can have new readers enjoy a story, by writing a GOOD STORY. The Lore is all great and stuff, but if you want to get folks in the door you still need a functional narrative. But no comic book company is actually writing for individual comic sales anymore, they all write for collections.

Now, I'm more of a Marvel fan then a DC fan, because of how the stories were written. The Difference in Classic DC story telling was having heroes as great paragons, demigods in their own rights with powers far beyond mere mortals. They fought great titans and monsters and gods. Classic Marvel made human heroes. Powers that are generally just barely superhuman, that had to worry about the very human interactions. They were flawed like how normal people are flawed, and fought villains that were likewise flawed.

DC's big name hero's are so over the top powerful that generally there ISN'T a problem they can't punch their way out of, so they have to go for some big personal story to give conflict, because you can't just have a 'Punch the Bank Robber, The End' story and keep butts in seats like when it was the news paper strip days.

With the new age of comics, they want flawed heros because they actually have some personality, but they warp it well beyond what 'flawed hero' . Some hit Anti Hero territory, and yeah you can tell those stories too. But some went straight out Villainous, while still expecting to be seen as the Heroes because that's what the character was intended to be.

Both Marvel and DC had options, when they wanted to explore alternate interptations of a character, the Elseworld comics, or the alternate timelines stuff. They could go out, show off some authors's different version of a character, and see what hit and what missed. Some characters, or aspects of characters, that proved popular wormed their way into the main stream. Alternatively they could just make new characters with similaries to the old ones....all the Image Comics stuff that was shoveled out the door generally ripped someone off, as an example.

 

Actually....I've got a question for the DC experts out there.

It comes as a rather big source of real world issues occurred right around when those Grim changes started to return to comics.

In the months after 9/11 happened, Marvel made a specific comic highlighting the event in their universe, making the actions canon to the fictional universe, to a degree. Marvel tended to, both before and after, stick fairly close to reality when it came to their maps of the world, and the nations in it. Yes there were fictional countries shoe horned in, but the middle east was still recognizable. With Marvel's 'sliding timeline' method for their mainline universe, we see those events influence the universe. Old versions of Iron Man for example had his origin in 'Nam, where as most now place his wounding in Afghanistan. We even see on occasion a real world political figure show up.

DC, at the time didn't really mention the attacks in universe. And it is rather hard to see it happening in a world where superman or a dozen other characters could almost single-handedly stopped it. And DC tends to fudge the geography of the world a fair bit more when it came using fictional nations as stand ins for real ones, and fictional political leaders standing in for real world ones.

Both universes have had reboots on one scale or another since it happened, and I do know that marvel has stuck far closer to things before as after. Writing for Both Marvel and DC took a turn towards something far more Grim after the real world events occurred, and fictional terrorists became a fairly easy target for 'generic villains' as well as sources of stories in the aftermath.

With WTR, Paul had a talk with Zatanna and a local cabbie when he was in the middle east, that pointed out the differences in their two universes. It's one of the little parts of this story that really sticks out in my mind even this long after reading it.

But I really don't know if the 'mainline' or other DC universes ever really stepped in to say that 'Yes, it did happen' and the fictional versions impact on the setting.

 

If Nu52's biggest/worst changes got done in Elseworlds, they would have been fine. The issue was rewritting half the DC landscape and leaving everything hard to even recognize/contradictory to how we knew the characters.
We have had the Warlike and man hating Amazons since 1989 (Bana Mighdall), Why didn't Nu52 have Wonder Woman from that group of Amazons instead and then her warlike behaviour makes sense. They could have had the Themysciran Amazons be revealed later. I'm fine with changes, but why did they make a 120 degree turn when they had had some Amazons they could have slightly nudged and fit the narrative he wanted.
Nu52 had some good ideas/concepts but the good ones got buried under very poor execution and the pile of bad ones.



Someone else said Zoat changes characters, He really hasn't for he most part in the way of backstories only in character growth (considering how different some of the Team and League/Allies are). Characters generally are introduced in a very recognizable manor and change through the story. Billy didn't start with the sword of Beowulf. Komand'r would have gone her normal route fairly soon without Paul's arrival. Alan was a dying Ex green, who is now a middle aged blue.
I change things in my stories, by accident and I fess up or on purpose with a reason. Zoat has only had a few minor mistakes I have noticed over 10ish years(and half the ones I did, were not wrong, only things I learned from a different era so are different from how I know). He needs to keep Paragon verse mainline and recognizable, or readers could/will have a way harder time understanding the changes made. He has done a very good job and I commend him for keeping so closely inline with Pre Flashpoint canon.

Personally I find the space arcs the most boring. I find the stakes hardest to comprehend/relate to, the space sections feel disconnected and I can't picture where they are in relation to earlier worlds we visited. I am very geography focus and I really have a hard time caring when I don't really know where anything is. This is not a fault of Zoat's, it's a failing of mine in visualization. Does anyone know of a map of YJ space? It would really help me have a better general idea of where things happened.