"That doesn't make me feel better at all." Jess said with a sigh.
"Well the band-aid has been ripped off so at least now you won't be caught off guard by it anymore." I say with a shrug.
After that we left the Lucky thirty eight with different destinations in mind. For Jess it was across the street at the Gomorrah casino and den of sin. Nasty place in my opinion. The easily verifiable source of the vast majority of the fiends. Unlike the other casino's this one specialized in all the earthly delights that you could think of. Drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, all openly advertised and offered for those brave or foolish enough to accept.-
The "servers" at the place wore little more than tape and tiny bits of leather and chains over their breasts and lower parts.
Yes that did include men too.
Unlike the place sharing that name in the bible however the ones in charge of this place were quite firm in the fact they didn't exactly sample their own goods. With the minor exception of recreational drug use but even then only enough to enjoy themselves a little and not get addicted. -
The issue with them was that they were getting some funny ideas about deposing House so all the profits they earned went right into their pockets rather than a good chunk of it going into Houses. I naturally let Jess know about this stuff before I left through the gate to Freeside and from there back out to the ruins surrounding Vegas. Nellis airforce base was located far to the north of the region. North east technically but the fact remained it was at the top of the game map. -
It was no small place either but a genuinely scaled military airforce base with massive hangers, a large ammunition stockpile, solar farm and various military half cylinder buildings that served as everything from a history museum to farms and medical stations. The population in the game was honestly illogically small but in reality I was fairly sure that it was considerably larger. Everywhere else had been more populous than the game made it seem after all. Actually reaching the airforce base wasn't particularly hard though I did have a run in with some of the wastelands apex predators along the way, Deathclaw.-
Supposedly originally Jackson chameleons, these massive demonic looking creatures were genetically altered through FEV and selective breeding to create what was now known as Deathclaw. On average they stood between eight and ten feet tall with lean tough scaled leather skin that was usually black, green or dark rusty red. They had long powerful almost human like arms that ended in a set of five digits tipped with claws that ripped through steel with only a bit more effort than flesh and bone. Their torsos were surprisingly narrow for the bulk of the beasts but heavily armored with thick muscle, skin and bone. Their legs reverse jointed and a strange sort of bipedal.-
Behind them depending on the region you'd find either long boney whip like tails or thick almost almost crocodilian ones. Their heads were not friendly looking either as they were topped with thick curved horns and short thick skulls that had large predatory mouths and small but sharp slitted eyes usually either yellow with black sclera or red with the same. As if that murderous reptilian abomination wasn't bad enough the things weren't stupid. In fact they were VERY clever. Not quite to the same level as a human but just below that level absolutely.-
Thanks to this the beasts spotted me on my bike and promptly ignored me. Between the obvious metal that encased my small form and the speed I was moving even trying to catch me was a wasteful idea in a predators mind. Of course it was. Even if they somehow actually managed to get me they'd still have to get through the metal for a meal that would barely fill even one of their bellies slightly. The predatory math was brutally clear, I wasn't worth the effort.-
I considered stopping to kill this hunting party of three but chose not to. Not because I was feeling merciful or was afraid of them but because there was no real point. Deathclaw were decently powerful as MTG cards but in reality not so much. In the Fallout MTG set an Alpha Deathclaw was merely a six six with [menace] and [trample] that you could pay to turn into a ten ten. In reality Deathclaw don't just get sudden boosts in power. What you see is what you get. In terms of card values that would put the average one at about a four four. An alpha that was the normal apex might hit five five.-
Certainly dangerous for most people but I even at this exact moment had creature cards up in the seven and eight range. And those numbers meant more the higher you went. It wasn't a simple matter of one plus one equaling two. It was exponential scaling. If one equaled a weak creature, physically I mean, then a two was the average, three was the excellent, four was extraordinary, five was incredible, six was approaching explosive levels of power, seven was insane and eight was practically a step below divine. Anything over that amount and you hit the territory of things whose power was scaled on space rather than strength. City block, multi city block, city, continent, planetary and so on.-
With that understanding in place it was pretty obvious how dangerous the Deathclaw actually were to me. That is to say fair to middling at best on the mortal scale. Anyways what interested me the most about these ones was not their danger but how they were lingering around a small scrap metal shack that I would be demented not to recognize.
Raul's shack.
The domicile of the ghoul companion of the game when you don't have the Lucky thirty eight accessed yet. He wouldn't be there right now obviously since he was trapped in the ruins of Black mountain by the mutant Tabitha as "her" maintenance slave.