GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.
I like the night. It's quiet. And in Fallout 3, it's harder for enemies to find me. But it's not the best time for spotting mines.
In the light, this would be light brass on gray asphalt, easy to spot. At night, I was asking for trouble. But thanks to some stim packs and some quick saves, I could manage. I made a deal with myself. I could quick save after a successful defuse, but I couldn't save if I had set off a mine I hadn't seen. It's still a lot more forgiving than just trying to do the whole minefield in one go, but the activity of creeping up on the mine and spamming the defuse key wasn't exactly my idea of fun, so I didn't feel that I was cheating myself out of anything.
Then the shooting started.
I know!
I had no idea where it was coming from. My stealth indicator told me no enemy had seen me. And I wasn't taking any damage. It didn't sound like heavy fire, anyway. More like someone plinking away with a BB gun. Then BOOM! I was dead.
Okay. I loaded my last quick save. Time for science.
I inched up toward the mine I had been trying to defuse. Sure enough, the plinking started again. So I booked it the heck out of there, hiding around the side of a nearby house. This is what I then saw.
Pretty, eh? I don't remember exactly when it happened, but I also used VATS (the time stopping targeting system in the game, useful for precision aiming) to get a lock. It turned out there was a sniper shooting nearby cars until they caught on fire, then exploded. In the world of Fallout 3, the discovery of atomic power went a little better than it did in ours. They could even make handheld fission batteries. So when the cars in the game explode, it's a very small nuke going off.
I continued moving up slowly, disarming mines and beating feet when the plinking picked up. There was a secondary goal to my mission of reaching a playground in the middle of the town, and I had come far enough that I wasn't going to turn back without accomplishing it. But the sun was coming up, and the playground was very close to the sniper, who would stop shooting cars and start shooting me if he saw me.
I decided to risk it, and was rewarded with a terrific view of a car exploding as I got to the playground.
It did get light enough that the sniper saw me. But I hid around some rubble, using the third person view to keep track of him. The way stealth works is that if an enemy only sort of sees you, your stealth status goes to Caution. They come to investigate what they saw / heard, get bored, and go back to what they were doing. This is what the sniper did. And the second he got bored and turned his back, he got shot. Part of me feels bad about that. I'd proven I could survive all his traps. I would have liked the option to say "no harm, no foul" and just called a truce. With my speech skill, it probably would have ended in shooting anyway. :P
This whole mission had been commissioned by Moira, a merchant in Megaton writing a book about surviving the wastes.
I'd be working for her chipper self, off and on, for a very long time. Sure her assignments were always good ways to get dismembered, but they were also fun and gave me something to do when I got tired of random wandering.
Next up, some random wandering.
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