In search of more-than-just-jalepeno garden starts for transplant to Wattsworth Gardens (I like that name, don’t you? It’s WW’s joint, after all), I find myself in yet another dark hole in the ground, Goodsprings Cavern. Goodsprings has a couple of these nooks to explore, one up by the traveling merchant stop, and this one behind Edgecomb Repair’s junk pile, and that’s just that I know of. I’m sure the Pip-Boy will alert me to more if they’re out there.
I have to remind myself that the Pip-Boy I’m using for dang-near everything now is designed for Vault-Dwellers, so of course it’s gonna have a predilection to caves. Oh man does it love caves. When there’s a cave nearby, it has a fit, it gushes cash-register noises and hard-edits a bunch of its maps, I’m a little concerned how dead-set it is on knowing where the caves are. That and killing stuff, which is fine. Hello, I’m Johnny Smash. But I never much cared for spelunking before, I always just figured caves were filthy and full of rats? Still, I guess my prescription computerized gauntlet knows best. I was right about Goodsprings Sewer, being filthy, and full of rats. Maybe Goodsprings Cavern will be different?
There’s lumber roads on the floor, that’s nice. It’s maintained, there are lanterns. And lovely green glowing mushrooms, which are promising. I follow a series of hallways with mushrooms growing out of the walls at comical angles. Maybe this isn’t going to be so bad.
I pick left in the first split of the cave, and of course it’s going to be so bad, why would I think it wouldn’t be? When will I learn? It’s mole-rats. Again.
I bash a couple of rats with my trusty guitar on pure revulsion instinct before I stop to notice how tiny they are compared to the rats I fought before. Just pups compared to the dog-sized ones that chewed my face off. I mean a puppy-sized rat is still a monstrous rat, but I feel like I have earned some perspective on giant rat bites by now. These aren’t as monstrous.
I momentarily feel bad, as I wipe yet more rat blood off my guitar. Like these relatively-less-monstrous rats might not be as noble sport or something?
Of course, having let my guard down, I am immediately mauled by a good old regular-sized monstrous rat.
Because I am an idiot who questions defending himself against the horrible monstrous rats if they’re even slightly less horribly monstrous. This wasteland is literally gonna chew a goody-goody like me up.
Kill one or two mole-rats, get killed, despair, repeat. Level 1 Drifter vs Rat Hole II: the fight by stalactite is just as difficult as the first bout in Goodsprings Sewer was, with just as many frustrated save-scums after just as many horrible deaths. Because of course it is, I’m still functionally the same Level 1 Drifter, same weapon, same armor. But the swarms of rat babies that only hit for half my health with a single bite, and only take three swings of a sledgehammer to kill, those are different this time. It’s like I’m fighting the same number of hit points in a different formation. Gotta change up the strategy. I might actually risk a healing item here or there.
Though the chances of getting snuck up on also go up. More targets to track. So many different flavors of rats eating my face, what a delight. I am gouged repeatedly over dozens of attempts.
(I’m the idiot who took the “I don’t mind grinding trash mobs” perk, I only have myself to blame).
I have to give Goodsprings Cavern credit, it’s not the same exact rat stomp as Goodsprings Sewer. Instead of 2-3 identical medium sized mole rats per room, which was a challenge of its own, this dungeon has waves of little rat pups protecting one regular size or even jumbo-sized rat in each room.
The furthest back chamber ups the ante with two regulars and one large. Oh what bliss. A tiered rat boss.
The Mole-Rat Pack.
Knife-Teeth: 12
HP: way too fucking much
It is dumb how much damage the big rat can take, and it is exactly as fast as the two medium sized guys which is also dumb. The entire rat pack at once is impossible to deal with, they’re just a tornado of teeth, so I watch them from the shadows for a bit, and case the joint. The big guy walks to the back of the cavern behind an old picnic table sometimes. I see my chance.
I grab the two normal rats’ attention while their boss is behind the picnic table, and kite them back through the cave. Using my coyote-swatting technique I run backwards while striking forward with the full swing of my upper body, swerving to avoid gnashing teeth, and I manage to knock one down. But by now, the big guy has caught up with me.
I get lucky. Backed up against a ramp of aluminum siding I get the high ground on the big rat and wail on him until his head explodes. One of his bodyguards is dead but I see no sign of the other one. Even with the big rat’s head sheered clean off by a mighty VATS-aided guitar-strike finisher I refuse to let my guard down. There’s still one of these guys in here somewhere. I can hear him snufflin’
I find the little bastard back in the room of the cavern where I fought another giant rat with its pups. It’s a good thing I already wiped them out or I’d have another, potentially even harder-to-sneak-up-on rat pack teethnado on my hands.
We fly at eachother and strike simultaneously mid-air, but only I, barely, survive. Another extremely hard level 1 animal fight, and I still haven’t leveled up. God help me.
Goodsprings Sewer and Cavern have a lot in common ultimately, they’re just a couple branching paths and some disturbingly tough rats arranged in waves guarding piddly junk and ammo caches, and a locked door that leads deeper. And one safe I have no hope of opening.
They both even have a garbled computer message, the Sewers’ on a terminal and the Caverns’ on a holotape cartridge labeled, promisingly, “Hidden Treasure Code”.
Despite being made of the same ingredients though, Goodsprings’ two local rat-stomps (that I know of) are in very different proportions, and play differently. The Cavern has mixed units of rats, and a door that requires a key, it can’t even be picked.
Goodsprings Cavern also gave me my first throwable weapon, in the form of a landmine, and a bunch of other semi-interesting junk left strewn about what looks like a cafe? At some point somebody might have been running a restaurant out of here, which would explain what looks like a fridge. At least I think it’s a weird little cafe with a fridge down here in this cavern, I’m fairly concussed after all.
Score! Fresh potato and mutfruit, exactly the sort of things I’m looking for. But the very best is in another side room, one with a busted up liquor cabinet and some soiled mattresses. I’m not even gonna guess what the locals used this room for.
Cave fungus! And not the green kind you can’t pull off the walls to save your life, these are nice ripe red cave fungus, perfect for growing somewhere dank and dark. I know a couple spots.
I high-tail it out of the hole, thoroughly sick of fighting rats in the dark, still level 1 dammit. I give Wattsworth the stray energy cells I found in the cavern, and the mole-rat meat. His cargo area is nearly full with wild game and scavenged electronics now, just as a well-to-do gentlemanly robot’s boot ought to be, wot wot. Watt watt?
Our plant-hunt is off to a good start but dayight’s a wastin’. Wattsworth and I comb the hills West of the schoolhouse but find no fruits or veggies. I do spot Victor hanging out at his shack at the edge of town, though. I scavenge a few bottles and an old baseball glove on the way out to see him.
Is it weird that the nicest places in Goodsprings belong to robots? I would think human creativity would be more on display, I mean other than that gaudy-as-hell sign at the Prospector, nobody in town seems to have decorated their homestead with much more than a few wilty crops.
But not Victor, his place is magnificent, with christmas lights and an old timey flag. I’m not sure if he actually fits through his own front door, but the interior is no less lovely as well.
Yes I go in, and yes I help myself to tools and batteries and the pilot light from Victor’s oven. He hasn’t written his name on any of them and I don’t even know if he can fit in here- the guy’s so nice I’m sure he won’t mind either way. His place is still much nicer than most humans’ homes I’ve seen. He even has clean, unirradiated water, which is a step above Wattsworth’s place.
Wattsworth’s tap water does make shaving easier, the hair just falls off. But I think I might still use the sink over here from now on.
Other than a few horsenettle plants the only thing worth scavenging from the Southwest edge of town is an old issue of Lad’s Life in a mailbox. It gets me thinking about barbecue.
We work our way to Goodsprings Source where there are a few camp fires still smoldering, a perfect place to smoke up some mole-rat steaks, mmm mmm. En route I come across a lone bloatfly.
I work out some anxiety slapping the pig-sized insect out of the air with my guitar.
Filthy monsters. But hey, after two whole introductory rat-stomps a coyote boss and a couple monster flies, I finally level the fuck up. Woo!
Melee, repair and science are no-brainers but even though it’s not my usual wheelhouse I figure even a few more points in barter now are gonna pay off majorly in the long run. I’m kinda tired of Chet price gouging me even when I just dragged him out of his bed at dawn. Jerk.
The perk is a much harder choice, I am very, VERY interested in Crazed Inventor, which will supposedly let me build my own junkbots using appliances and such. But I just can’t pass up the chance to get my real genuine RobCo cert, it’s been a long-held dream for this old grease-monkey. RobCo’s offices may have gone quiet centuries ago but you’d be surprised how many commercial bots are still walking around with their original firmware, which cares a whole lot about not voiding the lifetime warranty. I’ve seen pincer-fights over it.
+5 Barter
+3 Melee
+3 Repair
+3 Science
New perk= RobCo Certified
With that certification (by my wristwatch, for smooshing a bug) there’s a whole swath of models I’m now qualified to work on, no metal claws flailing in objection at all. This includes that classic Mr Handy I got up on blocks at Wattsworth’s, and the Protectron wreckage compressed in his trunk. I’m eager to get back home, elbow-deep in robot guts, but we still need to grill all this rat meat.
With some pro tips from the Lad’s Life (including using the magazine itself as kindling) I cook up a stack of rat steaks, some coyote and bloatfly bits too, and even straighten out a few tin cans. It’s amazing what you can do with an old tire fire and hunks of monsterflesh!
I can hardly wait to get wrenchin’ on bots but as I gather cans and bottles near a big road sign on the way back home, I spot a stranger with dual bandoleers and an octagonal looking face. We get to talking, and he warns me about a sacked caravan North of here.
When pressed about what exactly makes the North passage so dangerous, his response is merely “Deathclaws… death in general. But it’s your ass, I suppose”. Damn right it is. I chug a beer and sell him all my bullets for 37 caps.
Wattsworth and I luck out and find a couple more buffalo gourds growing on the way back home, we even manage to avoid any coyotes. I snack on one of their roasted packmates as we go and get home before dark, not starving or dying of thirst or anything. Not too shabby! I jump straight into my work on the Mr Handy, still chilling on the toilet next to the shelf of spare parts.
It’s a remarkably simple process to get the bot up and running again, just a new battery and a pile of gears, press “repair robot”…
… and presto! A sentient being! The ramifications are whatever, I’m not just playing God anymore, I’m a certified pro at this.
As expected, this new friend immediately prints out a warranty card instead of trying to strangle me for tinkering above my station, thank goodness. Cerulean Robotics huh? Must be a local subcontractor.
The no-frills protectron is up next, he’s even easier. Legs are way less tricky than hoverskirts any day, and I have lots of practice from wrenching Wattsworth who is far more advanced.
Now I have three friends! THREE! That’s more than, uh, ever, I guess. My Pip-Boy tells me I even have the bandwidth to manage 2 more which is just nuts. Has anyone ever had FIVE friends before? Certainly not. Nobody’s that popular.
After a few hours of dead-tired sleep, I gather my new clickity-clack clique and all the vegetables we scavenged and finally get Wattsworth Gardens looking good. Real good, in fact!
Agave, barrel cactus, prickly pear, xander root, buffalo gourd, we even plant tobacco and horsenettle, and a little cave fungus by the repair toilet. The potatoes and mutfruit will have to wait for now, as they require some kind of watering system I’m not ready for yet, but the main staples, corn and jalepenos, are plentiful enough I shouldn’t have to worry about food anymore. Mission accomplished.
We only suffer one radscorpion attack the whole time too, which is pretty good, and it reveals that Mr. Handy not only has a British accent but still believes in a Queen and some kind of Country? He’s a surprisingly effective guard for a robot designed to walk dogs and diaper babies, so I think he’ll live outside.
I even set up the containers inside using Stash Organizer. There’s only 3 (for now) making organization limited, but it’s enough for a simple food sorting system, to really cap the facility off. And a cool side effect of setting it all up is I can re-name the cell. Wattsworth Gardens is officially open for business!
With the old rebuilt bots to mind the garden and the garage, Wattsworth is now free to join me on my quest. I have a robot butler full of corn and laser ammo, a bandoleer’s worth of jalepenos and a whole level to my name. How bad could this Northern passage full of deathclaws really be?