New Vegas: Sheason's Story

It's me again, Mr. New Vegas, reminding you that you're nobody 'til somebody loves you, and that somebody is me. I love you. It's that time again, ladies and gentlemen – time for me to put on my newsman fedora. Word out of Camp Golf is that many NCR Rangers can expect re-deployment in the near future. One anonymous soldier said it was part of a new strategy. Also, Caesar's Legion continues to fortify its position in Nelson, where it remains a constant concern for Camp Forlorn Hope and the nearby town of Novac. The preceding segment was sponsored by the Silver Rush: feel the rush of a warm laser in your hand. In New Vegas, sometimes you've got to feel just a little bit sad if you want to feel happy. Frank Sinatra knows this better than most, and all he asks for is One for My Baby (And One More for the Road).

Cass and I walked into the lobby of the motel, and I was met with the overwhelming sense of "green." The wallpaper, peeling and cracked in places, was a pale green with a faded and barely visible floral pattern. The moldy and torn couch pressed up against the far wall was made out of dark green leather. The floor tiles were various shades of green, some light, some dark in no discernable pattern that I could really see. The lamp in the center of the slowly spinning fan on the ceiling was made out of green smoked glass. Tiny green dinosaur toys – miniatures of the giant dinosaur outside – littered nearly every surface in the room. Even the radio, crackling slightly but unmistakably tuned to Radio New Vegas and playing some Old World song, was green.

I continued to be overwhelmed by the color green when I got a good look at the woman sitting behind the front desk. Part of that was the lighting, I'll admit, but it was mostly the dark green dress she was wearing. She was middle-aged, with grey hair held up on the top of her head in a bun, and was surprisingly… large. She wasn't fat, just plump; the only thin part of her was her long thin nose, upon which was perched a pair of extremely large glasses, with thick lenses that made her half-opened, heavy lidded eyes look positively enormous. When we walked in, she turned from her magazine, looked up at me and smiled wide, with dimples in her cheeks the size of golf balls.

"Well, welcome to you," she said with the voice of a very tired, sweet old lady. "You look tired from the road. Why don't you relax a spell, let this fine town take care of you? Oh, but where are my manners? I got to thinking about making a good impression and plain forgot to tell you my name! I'm Jeannie May. I take care of folks here at the motel, long as they aren't trouble makers."

"Hey there," I said, reaching the front desk and finally getting a word in edgewise. "I'd like to rent a room." Somehow, she managed to smile even wider at that.

"Well, I think that's a splendid idea! I'll give you a good flat rate, and you can stay as long as you like. At least until the busy season comes. Does that sound good?" I nodded. "Alright, it'll be 14 caps a night," she said, pulling a key from a hook on the wall behind her. She placed it on the desk as I pulled out a stack of 20 bottlecaps; I kept them in groups of 20, to make it easier to count them out. "Your room will be the one upstairs, closest to the lobby side. Let me know if there's anything I can do to make your stay better for you."

"Oh, it's not for me," I said, picking up the key and tossing it to Cass. She caught it in midair. "Go on and get settled. I'll catch up."

"Thanks. I owe ya," Cass said, strolling out of the lobby. I turned back the Jeannie May.

"Before I leave, I wanted to ask you a question."

"Of course. What can I help you with?"

"I'm looking for a man in a checkered coat. Have you seen anyone like that pass through here recently?" Her smile evaporated instantly, and her face screwed up, almost as if she suddenly smelled something foul.

"Well, he might've been wearing a fancy outfit, but he wasn't any sort of gentlemen to me. Had his nose stuck up so high in the air, you couldn't see it above the clouds. City folk, they always think they deserve better than what they got. He even insulted my motel – asked him to leave that very day. Those hoodlums he was with weren't much better, but they seemed to know Manny for some reason…"

"So where can I find this Manny?"

"He's one of the snipers that help protect the town. Your best bet to find him is up in the dinosaur's mouth."

The inside of the dinosaur was… not what I was expecting. I opened the door to a gift shop, and every single shelf on every wall was filled from side to side with those same tiny dinosaur toys I'd seen in the motel lobby. And the man who ran the little shop, Cliff, seemed oddly fixated with the things; I only asked him if it was alright if I went up the stairs to talk with the sniper, and somehow he managed to steer the conversation towards asking me if I wanted to buy one of the T-Rexes. I declined, and I heard him mutter something about how nobody ever wanted to buy the T-Rexes as I made my way up the stairs towards the sniper perch.

I slid the door open and immediately tensed up as I heard the unmistakable click of a pistol's hammer being cocked.

"Whoa, hey! Don't shoot!" I said, making sure my hands were in the air and away from Roscoe as the door continued to slide open. A revolver was pointed directly at me, but was quickly decocked and put away. The man was holding the revolver in one hand, and had a silenced, scoped hunting rifle in his other. He was huge; even without the red beret, I could've told you from his build that he was ex military. He had a heavy-set and clean shaven jaw, and I couldn't tell if it was just naturally wide or if he was chewing tobacco. He looked at me with a frown from behind a pair of sunglasses.

"Goddamnit!" he said, his voice gravelly, weary, and low. He turned back in his chair, and looked out through the dinosaur's mouth, towards the general direction of the Colorado river. "Don't sneak up on me like that. What do you want?" He spoke quickly and tersely, wasting no words on unnecessary pleasantries.

"I was told there was a sniper nest up here."

He turned slightly to look at me, appraising me with a scowl.

"I think you'd better leave."

"Hang on – are you Manny?" There was a very long pause.

"No." There was another pause, and then he added "You don't know who I am?"

"I'm looking for Manny, because I want to ask him some questions. But if you're not him, I guess I'll leave."

"Wait," the cold sniper said as I was turning to walk back out the door. "You just got into town, right? Maybe you shouldn't go. Not just yet." I raised an eyebrow.

"Why not?"

"I need someone I can trust. You're a stranger. That's a start."

"You only trust strangers?" I asked, confused.

"I said it was a start," he practically spat. "This town… nobody looks me straight in the eye anymore. I need the kind of help I can only get from an outsider." I thought about what he said, and I had to admit… there was a string of morbid curiosity in my brain that wanted to pursue this conversation. So I closed the door, and regarded him carefully.

"Ok then. What do you need?" I said. I figured, it couldn't hurt to at least listen to what he had to say.

"I want you to find something out for me. I don't know if there's anything to find, but I need someone to try. My wife was taken from our home by Legion slavers one night while I was on watch. They knew when to come. What route to take. And they only took Carla. Someone set it up. I don't know who."

"So you're trying to track down your wife?"

"My wife's dead," he said, forcefully. "I want the son of a bitch who sold her."

"You said she was taken by Legion. How do you know she's dead?" I asked. I thought it was a fair question, but he practically bit my head off with his response.

"I just know, all right?" He practically shouted, but lowered his voice and continued. "That's all you need to know."

"Alright, sorry. Ok, so, I find the person responsible. What would you want me to do when I find… whoever it is?"

"Bring him out in front of the nest here while I'm duty." He pointed down to a specific spot far enough away from the town to be obscured at ground level, but with a clear line of sight from his sniper perch. "I'll give you my NCR beret to put on. It'll be our signal, so I know you're standing with him. And I'll take care of the rest." I thought about what he was asking for a few minutes. He was on a quest for revenge, same as me. And even though I wasn't really all that concerned at the moment with fighting them, I didn't have any love for Legion, or the people who worked with them.

"Alright," I said finally. "I'll see what I can find out"

"Good," he said, nodding and removing his beret, revealing a buzzed, almost completely shaved head. "I'll make it worth your while. And one more thing," he said, handing me the beret. "We shouldn't speak again. Not until it's over. No one in town knows that I know what happened to my wife. Best they never know, or the Legion will be after me next." I nodded, understanding completely.

I took a look at the beret, turning it over in my hands. It was red, with a patch on the front of a bear skull with crossed rifles behind it. There was a slogan above and below the skull, that said "NCR 1st Recon" and "The last thing you never see."

"So what do I call you?" This was an annoying habit that I'd started to notice about NCR troopers – they refused to give me a name unless I asked.

"Boone."

I only spent 15 or 20 minutes asking around town before I realized that Carla, Boone's wife (I still had no idea if Boone was his last name or his first name), wasn't exactly the most popular person in town. A couple of people didn't know her, but the ones that did all pretty much had the same opinion: she was a bitch. She talked down to people, she'd spend most of her time sulking in her room, and she made sure everyone knew that she thought she deserved better than what Novac could offer. Of course, for all their complaints, nobody seemed to know anything about the disappearance. A few people didn't even realize she was gone.

Now, I know what you may be asking: "Sheason, how can you be sure they weren't just lying?" and that is a very good point. The only real explanation I can give is that I'm just good at reading people. It's something I've always been able to do, even as a kid. The way someone speaks, their body language, the movement of their eyes, how dilated their pupils are, and countless other clues: I'm just able to pick up on these things.

There were two people I questioned, however, that sent up red flags: the first was Jeannie May. I caught her as she was closing up the motel front desk. As soon as I asked about Boone's wife, she tensed up almost imperceptibly for half a second, but then it disappeared, replaced with a sort of melancholy sadness.

"How should I put it?" she said finally. "I guess you could say she was kind of like a cactus flower. Real pretty to look at, but there was just no getting close to her. She never did take to living here. She liked the big lights and fast living of New Vegas. I got the feeling she was trying to get Boone to leave with her, but I guess she got tired of waiting."

She was lying about something, I could tell. But the thing that really caught my attention, as I watched her walking away towards one of the houses across the 95, was something very simple: of all the people I'd asked around town, she was the only one who offered an explanation for Carla's disappearance.

The other person that sent up a red flag (but for a very different reason) was this crazy old man wandering around town; I bumped into him accidentally as I turned a corner. He was wearing tatty brown rags, and his grey hair and unshaven beard were messy and unkempt. When I turned the corner, he stared at me intensely, his eyes wide and completely fixed on me.

"Who sent you?!" he practically yelled. He sounded like he'd smoked a carton of cigarettes a day. "I ain't talkin'! They tried to get me to talk before, but I didn't say nothin', and I don't aim to now, by gum!" I was afraid he might try and stab me if I made any sudden movements or upset him, so I kept my distance and decided to humor him.

"Who tried to make you talk?" I asked, and he immediately looked defeated.

"Confound it, No-bark, you done it again. You let on that you know things. Now they'll never let you be. They'll come for you in the night like they did for that lady."

"Wait, what?" I asked. "Are you talking about Boone's wife?" He nodded.

"Seen it all," he said, pointing at his eyes with both fingers. "Seen shadowy folk come to his room and leave again in the middle of the night. Thought one might've gone in the lobby, too, for a spell. Could be that person went in to get something. Or use the john, maybe. Mighty interesting either way, you ask me," he said, stroking his beard. "I thought it was cannibals, come to eat us all for sure, so I kept out of sight. But now I know better!"

"So… who was it, if it wasn't cannibals?" I was almost afraid to ask.

"Molerat men! Come up from the Underneath to steal young women with promises of riches and fancy mud mansions with all the latest designer appliances! They covet our ladyfolk's long hair for wigs, it's said, being either bald or balding themselves!"

"Uh… that's… interesting."

"If anyone asks, we never spoke." And with that, he wandered off, muttering to himself something about the Chupacabra that I couldn't quite hear.

I didn't know what to think. This guy, No-bark, was an obvious crackpot… but for some reason, it felt like there might have been a nugget of truth in what he said. Part of that was the fact that the first part of his story – people coming in the middle of the night to take Carla – actually matched up with what Boone had told me. Add in the fact that Jeannie May was lying about something, and that he mentioned someone had gone into the lobby before leaving…

I decided to take a look in the lobby, to see what I could find.

I checked my Pip Boy's clock – it was close to 11 pm by the time I made my way back to the lobby. The town of Novac was silent except for the chirping of crickets. No one was around. And for what I was about to do, that was a very good thing. I tried the door, but it wouldn't budge. I looked around again, double checking that no one was around. I knelt down, taking a look at the lock. It was pretty simple. I pulled out my torsion wrench and a hook pick, and set to work.

This may seem odd that I would know how to pick a lock, but you need to understand something – if you want to thrive out in the wasteland, rather than simply survive, one of the skills you need to learn is lockpicking. I'd learned the basics of it when I lived in Shady Sands for that short period, and it had come in handy more times than I could count over the years. The most useful that skill had been, by far, was the one time I'd been captured by raiders just outside Klamath. Ever since then, I always kept a torsion wrench and a few various tumbler picks on me, just in case. In a pinch, I could use a screwdriver and some bobby pins, but that wasn't ideal.

The door opened with a satisfying click.

I turned on the light, and the interior was just as green as I'd remembered it. I had no idea what I was looking for, honestly. But I decided to start with the floor safe behind the front desk counter. There were other places that were probably less obvious around the room that someone who was actually trying to hide something would use, sure. But I started with the safe just to be thorough, not actually expecting to find anything.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I cracked the safe and found a slip of paper bearing a red bull stamp. With a mounting sense of unease and dread, I unfolded it, and read:

We, the representatives of the Consul Officiorum, have this day bargained and purchased from Jeannie May Crawford of the township of Novac the exclusive rights to ownership and sale of the slave Carla Boone for the sum of one thousand bottle caps, and those of her unborn child for the sum of five hundred bottle caps, the receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged. We warrant the slave and her young to be sound, healthy, and slaves for life. We covenant with the said, Jeannie May Crawford, that we have full power to bargain and sell said slave and her offspring. Payment of an additional five hundred bottle caps will be due pending successful maturation of the fetus, the claim to which shall be guaranteed by possession of this document.

Marcus Scribonius Libo Drusus et al.

Administrators of M. Lichinius Crassus, Consul Officiorum ab Famulato

I knelt there in stunned silence for a few minutes, just reading the note over and over again. I felt ill.

I banged on the door to Jeannie May's house hard enough to make sure she'd hear it, even if she was asleep. About a minute later, she opened the door, rubbing her eyes. She was wearing a robe, and didn't have her glasses. She blinked wearily and tried to focus on me. When she realized who it was, she looked concerned.

"Well, hello…" she said, slightly perplexed. "It's awful late to be coming around here for a chat – is everything all right? Is something the matter?"

"Oh, everything is all right," I said, putting on my best poker face. "But there's something I think you need to see."

I made sure I didn't have any bits of Jeannie May's head on me as I walked back into town. When I'd gotten her into position, I'd barely put the beret on when the back of her head simply exploded. She collapsed, Boone's bullet killing her instantly.

There was still no one around town – I didn't even see Victor anywhere – as I made my way up the stairs and into the dinosaur. As I reached for the door to the dinosaur's mouth, I hesitated, and rapped on the door instead.

"Who is it?" I heard Boone ask.

"It's Sheason." The door opened with a click.

"That's it then," he said as the door closed behind me. "How did you know?"

"I found this," I handed him the bill of sale, and gave him his beret back. He took a look at it, and the scowling expression on his face remained unchanged. He crumpled the letter in his hands, and tossed it onto the floor.

"I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's just like them to keep paperwork." He handed me a bag of bottlecaps. "Here. This is all I can give. I think our dealings are done here." A thought crossed my mind.

"Wait, do you think anyone's going to connect you to that bitch with the hole in her head? You're not an outlaw now, are you?"

"No," he said simply. "People die out there. Often enough that no one worries about blame. They're too anxious to forget it happened in the first place, I guess. Besides," For the first time since meeting him, I saw him smirk. "I was on break when it happened."

"So, what are you going to do now?"

"I don't know," he gazed out at the desert. "I won't be staying, I know that. Don't see much point in anything right now, except hunting legionaries."

"What, all by yourself?"

"Yeah," he said simply.

"You're a sniper though, right? Don't snipers work in pairs – one sniper, one spotter?" I asked, honestly not really sure. I'd seen something about that in an old holotape movie about snipers in the Old World, but I didn't know if that was accurate or not.

"Yeah. Normally. But if I'm going to hunt Legion, I'll do it alone. What about you?"

"What about me?" The question caught me a bit off guard.

"You're hunting for someone, I can tell. It's why you helped me." That… was surprisingly perceptive. I wouldn't have called that.

"Yeah, you're right. I'm looking for the man who shot me. A guy in a checkered coat, travelling with some Great Khans. Have you seen him?"

"No. Sorry. Talk to Manny. He works days."

I knocked on the door to Cass' room. I was still emotionally drained from the discovery in the motel lobby, and somehow watching the bitch responsible for selling a woman and her unborn child into slavery getting her head blown off did nothing to make me feel better. So I decided there was only one thing I could do.

When Cass opened the door, it looked like she'd been drinking… but that wasn't really a change, she always looked like she was drinking. Her suede jacket had been discarded somewhere, as had her cowboy hat; her red hair fell down loose around her face and down her back. She leaned against the doorframe, a half finished bottle of whiskey in hand.

"Hey, Shea," she said with a smile. "What's up?"

"I need a drink," pointing at the bottle. "May I?"

"Sure," she said, putting the bottle in my hand. I tipped my head back, and poured the rest of the bottle down my throat. It burned in the best possible way.

"Thanks," I told her, placing the empty bottle back in her hand, and walking down the motel stairs, back to my car.