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so, in fairness

however,,,can i just say something

in fo4. after you kill kellog. when nick suggests that u harvest his brain to read his memories.

im okay with memory reading and memory pods or whatever, but like. why is everyone so okay with you having kellogs little brain shrimp

like nick says, ‘we can get some of his brain’ and sole is like, ‘o i already took some actually’ and NOBODY BLINKS. I mean, first of all, to have taken it, you would have to have CRACKED HIS SKULL OPEN when you killed him-and I get it. video game corpses drop loot. but its not like you took a finger or some teeth, you took a part of the hippocampus.

the blue thing is the hippocampus

not only is it tiny, it’s also in, like, the fucking middle of the brain! which means the sole survivor not ONLY cracked kellogs skull open to get at his gray matter like some kind of enraged chimpanzee, they also, like, dug around in there-with apparently surgical precision

and thats fine. i believe you could steal kellogs brain shrimp. fine. that fits within sci-fi video game logic.

but if you have a companion with you-and you CAN bring a companion with you on this quest-why do they just sit there and watch you take part of his brain for no reason?

and its not like you just take his brain! you can also get ‘cybernetic limb actuator’ and ‘cybernetic paint inhibitor’ if i recall correctly, which are represented as sort of..robot parts. which are, like, for SURE on the inside of his body! they are not on the outside of his body, you CANNOT see them, and so i can only assume that they’re like, his fucking robot bones, which you simply CLEAVE FROM HIS BODY

which okay. fine. but they don’t even DO anything. you cannot do anything with them. all you can do is hock them for a few caps to some understandably confused merchant who probably doesn’t even know what they are, has no use for them, and probably cannot conceive of the horrific, grisly manner in which they were acquired

i just can’t fucking. understand the narrative justification for why you can say ‘oh, no i actually already took some brain-do you guys need it?’ and absolutely no one freaks out. they act like you took his keys out of his pocket. i mean, maybe they DID see you squat down for like, probably a couple hours, to carefully crack open his skull, pull the top of it off like a coconut, carefully extract his brain, disassemble it, then go, ‘aha!” and take his robot brain shrimp, pocket it, and leave. maybe they all saw it!

maybe they saw it so they arent SURPRISED that you have it, but even if it isn’t technically a surprise, i still think it should be shocking! like, im sorry, i get that fallout takes place in a post apocalyptic hellscape where people eat each other but piper and nick are both staunchly good aligned characters who live in an arguably nice part of town. they aren’t raiders or slavers, so like. why would they be okay with this fucking goddamn vaultie off their absolute nut pulling a piece of brain out of their pocket like it’s a house key

im just not fucking sold on this whole transaction. i know todd needed us to get to the memory den, and we needed to have kellog’s brain at that point in the story so we could read his memories to find out where the institute is. and i know it would be like, shitty and boring to make the player go all the way back to his little boss arena and pick his corpse over for brain parts, but like, was there no more graceful solution to this problem!?