Fallout 3 has a quest (Head of State) that involves getting a group of wastelanders from a dilapidated building out in the wilderness to the Lincoln Memorial in the middle of the ruins of Washington DC. Now, technically, one can just fast travel there and wait around a day or two for them to show up, but I was determined to play this in character and escort them the full way there. This was a very stupid idea.
Things started off well enough, with a couple of Yao Guai attacking from here and there, but nothing my plasma rifle couldn't handle. About a half mile down the road, our little caravan of six-ish people and a Brahmin ran into Lucky Harith, premiere weapon salesman of the wasteland. He was going in the opposite direction, and we passed with little incident. We were heading up a hill, and I soon realized that our path took us right through an outpost the Enclave had set up at the top of the hill. Just as I was wondering if there was any way to get these clueless NPCs to stop or change course, I heard shots from behind me.
I turned around to see Lucky Harith and his bodyguard being attacked by four or five raiders who had somehow not been there when we passed along the same stretch of road. Harith and his companion had their backs to an old army transport truck. Now, anyone who has played Fallout 3 knows that you want to be as far away from abandoned vehicles as possible during a firefight. And sure enough, stray raider bullets were smacking into the truck, which had just caught alight. I tried to take out the raiders before they could do any more damage, but it was too late.
The truck's reactor blew up with the force of a mini nuke, blowing Harith's limbs off and gibbing the raiders beyond recognition. His bodyguard somehow survived without a scratch, and ran off up the road. Guess I'll never be buying weapons from him again.
But the general misfortune was only just beginning. By this time, the caravan I had completely forgotten about was at the Enclave base, and the soldiers were engaged with the wastelanders. One of them died before I could do anything, and when I ran in I was engulfed with flames from some jackass and his Heavy Incinerator, so I was already at low health when I could start VATSing soldiers. The firefight was nasty, although we had a little help from the late Harith's bodyguard, who took a few potshots at the Enclave before being set on fire and running away. I did not exactly survive. Let's just say quicksave and quickload were in frequent use.
When we finally beat the Enclave down to a single officer, things got even worse. Some exploding Brahmin in a field to the east hailed the entrance of two sentry bots to the battlefield, miniguns whirring and rockets blazing. At the same time--I shit you not--at the exact same time they appeared, two Deathclaws showed up from the road south. So now our heavily wounded and poorly armed group of survivors had to face off against two of the strongest robots in the game as well as two of the strongest monsters. That's at least six more than anyone should half to deal with, and I was all out of Mirelurk meat.
I desperately searched through my inventory, looking for something that would help, when I realized I had three Bottlecap Mines I had completely forgotten about. I threw them in front of the Deathclaws, and none too soon, as they were mere feet away from our brahmin, and those fuckers can move. Suffice to say, they did the trick. three bottlecap mines exploding in the same place at once equals about a thousand points of damage, which is absolute overkill in any situation. It was very satisfying to watch the Deathclaws' legs go spiraling away from the rest of them.
Then I remembered the Sentry Bots. I was just a teeny bit sick of fighting at this point, so I just went berserk. I grabbed some Hellfire armor off a dead Enclave soldier, as it offered noticeably better protection than my awesome-yet-impractical leather jacket and fedora, whipped out my Super Sledge, and beat the living shit out of both robots. I didn't even bother with VATS, and the armor protected my dwindling hitpoints from the worst of their minigun fire. They finally went limp and made pathetic buzzing noises, which could only mean good things.
I continued along the road with the caravan, and we had no further incidents until reaching the subway tunnels, where, about halfway through, the Brahmin got stuck between two train cars and was completely immovable. And so, I used my brilliant problem-solving skills to...fast travel to the Lincoln Memorial, wait sixteen hours, greet the wastelanders as they appeared from the metro station, brahmin blinking stupidly, and wonder why the hell I hadn't just done that in the first place.
After the quest was complete, I went back and took Lucky Harith's hat. I now wear it everywhere as a symbol of his valiantly stupid last stand.
