Fries Finally Made a Fallout Blog

this is. really cute

yes. yes this is good-

Schmuck

I’m in Sanctuary:

I discovered a terminal for a drug dealer (turns out one of my neighbours was dealing chems… go figure.) One of his clients is a C.I.T scientist who wanted an entire *pallet* of mentats. But he doesn’t know what for.

I know what for…

CIT was working on a method to scan the brains of trauma victims, recording their consciousness in order to use it in their artificial intelligence programmes at a later date (when the tech finally caught up.)

The ruse was that the scan alone would cure the problem, but obviously it wouldn’t. The alternative? Stick them on a hefty Mentats prescription. I believe there are references in other fallout games to Mentats being used to treat anxiety.

The alternative use is that the Mentats would overexcite parts of the brain associated with memory and recall, resulting in stronger results when they got their brains scanned. A large enough dose could result in addiction, but it was a small price to pay as far as they were concerned.

But why get them from a drug dealer? Why not just get them from the pharmaceutical company that makes them? Because the prescription was going to be totally off the books. Big shipments of Mentats would draw suspicion from governing bodies as to the nature of their work. Smaller illegal shipments wouldn’t be tracked, of course there’s no way to tell if they were getting the real deal, or what it could possibly be cut with, but it was better than having some suit sniffing about and shutting them down.

The seed of the Institute was planted long before the bombs even fell.

So who were the victims subjects?

They took trauma victims because they were easy to rope into the programme. But I’m guessing very few of them were civilians. I reckon the vast majority were soldiers with a number of them from police departments across Boston. These were going to be the first coursers. Minds of people with great intellect and skills placed into hard to kill robot bodies.

The only one was know of was our very own Synth detective: Nick Valentine.

I have to share the angst… it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with but at least now I don’t have to explain why I’m making little effigies of CIT scientists and sticking pins into them.

To make it worse: Imagine Nick trying to deal with flashbacks to his life/Jenny *without* being able to rely on Mentats to stabilise him (after they got him hooked on them during the scans.) A synth going through withdrawl despite having never touched chems in his life. There would be no way to stop the pain, the tremoring, the overheating. Nick’s mind is racing a mile a minute and he can’t focus on anything.

You’re hitting on something that rings really true for me: as much as he is his own person, synth!Nick is very much an extension of human!Nick. He is not human and his memories are not his own, yet they might as well be. The ghost of Jenny Lands hangs as heavy over synth!Nick as it must have over human!Nick. The trauma of her loss informs synth!Nick’s actions as strongly as it must have influenced human!Nick’s. Human and Synth!Nick have been abandoned by the Institute, cast aside once they were no longer useful. 

Synth or Human, poor Nick just can’t catch a break.

This is easily one of the nicest things ever said to me, thank you ^_^

THIS MIGHT GET TL;DR, please stay with me :s

1) Nick is NOT as au-fait with his identity as he makes out.

Despite telling us that he got over the confusion of  being synth in the commonwealth a few weeks after waking up in landfill; its clear that Nick is only just coming to terms with his identity. Especially after his personal quest. I think that’s where it really hits home that a large part of his identity is that his memories came from someone else. And the realisation that he’s not human, but he is a person.

Let’s face it: he could have looked for Eddie Winter’s tapes by himself. He could have done this entire thing decades ago. The only reason he didn’t was because Eddie Winter was a big part of his percieved identity. He just could not let him go. Probably spent many nights thinking about what killing Winter would mean for his identity, which is why he put it off for so long.

2) Nick covers up his insecurities with sass. Which tells us a lot about what he’s afraid of.

I also believe a fear of abandonment is a defining factor in both his and human!Nick’s personalities. It informs a surprising amount of what he does, he covers it up with a mountain of snark. But it really becomes apparent if (god forbid) you ever do anything to disappoint him. Then it all comes spilling out: he tells you he sees too many people ‘giving in’ to their greed and their hate. Tells you he was certain you were different, and that you are destroying all the hopes he had.

If you push him too far he yells at you, angrily pushing you away and cutting you out of his life completely. But not before sassing you from one end of the Commonwealth to the other. Which tells us that Nick has always used sarcasm to deal with his emotions. And they always boil over when people push him away.

I agree with you: Nick can’t catch a break because he is still haunted by the ghosts of a man he’s never even met.

ALSO: I too want to see a fix-it AU… but my mind just keeps going to dark places.

I already know this post has reached TL;DR territory, so bear with me…

What if Jenny was *never* ‘Nick’s girl’…

Eddie reveals to Nick that he didn’t kill Jenny, why would he kill his own niece? The only reason she ever got with Nick in the first place was so she could feed information on Operation Winter’s End back to him.

It was unfortunate for Eddie that Jenny actually started getting sweet on Nick for real, and stopped giving useful information. With her now being more of a liability: something had to be done.

She needed to be removed from the picture in such a way that NO ONE would question where she’d gone, not even Nick.

Eddie stages the shooting of Jennifer Lands. Sticks a corpse with remarkably accurate (and expensive) facial reconstructive surgery in the middle of the street. Nick blames Eddie and claims something isn’t right about the whole situation (even after Winter’s End is closed), his boss starts thinking Nick is losing the plot when hes asked to ID the body and Nick says ‘She never had a birthmark there!’ Sends him to CIT. Two birds, one stone.