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Epilogue
Music: Ending Theme
So, before we look at the ending slideshow that shows what happens after everything is said and done, let’s take a look at how they accomplish such a task. It’s basically the game teleporting us into a room with a projector in front of our character, forced into first-person mode. Enabling player controls via the console will let us move and change our camera.
I feel it’s fitting that Cannibal Johnson managed to make his way into the room as well. As for the voice files...
They are spoken from this NPC, Ron the Narrator. It’s Ron Perlman, the original and continuing narrator for the Fallout franchise. He’s in Legion gear which, if you happen to follow the actor’s musings and remarks recently, is kinda insulting to him but hey, the game’s almost nine years old.
Anyway, onto the show!
Travelers continued to stop by Goodsprings Source for water on the Long 15, but rarely would anyone venture into the ruins of Goodsprings itself.
Those who did were almost always tourists, come to visit the graveyard where the Courier "rose from the dead."
After Hoover Dam, the leaderless Powder Gangers at the Correctional Facility vanished into the wastes, leaving the prison empty.
The Correctional Facility became another abandoned ruin in the wasteland, its carcass occasionally picked over by enterprising prospectors.
After Hoover Dam, Sheriff Meyers runs Primm with his own style of frontier justice.
He deals with most folks fairly, but now and then someone winds up dead with little to no evidence against them.
Though Novac was a low-priority target for the Legion, many of Novac's citizens died in its defense.
In the weeks that followed, several Bright Followers returned to Novac to help restore its defenses, allowing it to remain independent of the NCR.
Tabitha and Rhonda went east, through Caesar's land. Occasionally tales of their exploits found their way back west, though few believed them.
Eventually the stories concerning the duo were collected and published, and proved to be quite popular with children.
Thanks to the Courier and Lily, a cure for the nightkin's schizophrenia was found shortly after Doctor Henry's experiment concluded.
Nightkin and other super mutants in the wasteland flocked to Jacobstown, and the town became known as a haven where a mutant could find peace.
Invigorated by his travels with the Courier, Raul once more took up his guns in memory of his lost Rafaela.
Soon after, the Mojave was filled with tales of the ghost-vaquero who hunts down those who prey on the weak.
Though the Wasteland became anarchic after Hoover Dam, the Boomers' display of power dissuaded fortune seekers from attempting to penetrate Nellis.
With The King dead and most of their gang slain by the Courier, the remaining Kings fled the area, never to be heard from again.
During the Battle of Hoover Dam, the Great Khans quickly evacuated Red Rock Canyon and headed north and east into the plains of Wyoming.
There, they reconnected with the Followers of the Apocalypse and rebuilt their strength.
Bolstered by ancient knowledge of governance, economics, and transportation, they carved a mighty empire out of the ruins of the Northwest.
After the majority of the Vault 19 Powder Gangers joined the Great Khans, the weaker members scattered throughout the Mojave Wasteland.
Though a few managed to erase their pasts, most never survived the journey.
After the Courier ensured New Vegas remain free, the Followers found that independent Vegas was even more unstable and violent than before.
Old Mormon Fort became excessively burdened by the influx of patients, struggling to provide even the most basic of services.
Arcade was tending to the locals of Freeside when he learned that Caesar's Legion had been defeated and NCR was being pushed out of New Vegas.
Though he found that independence for New Vegas was not all he hoped it would be, Arcade did his best to help the locals govern themselves.
Driven into a frenzy by their use of psycho, The Misfits inflicted heavy casualties on the Legion during the defense of Camp Golf.
At first they were commended for their valor, but eventually, desperate for more of the chem, they turned on travelers in Outer Vegas.
For their dishonorable conduct, the NCR court-martialed and executed them by firing squad.
Despite distinguishing themselves during the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, the rangers' victory was short-lived due to the Courier's interference.
Chief Hanlon personally directed the evacuation of the rangers to Mojave Outpost as they fell back into NCR territory.
Bitter over the waste of life in the Mojave, Hanlon stepped down from his post.
After a campaign in which he denounced Oliver's and Kimball's hawkish, imperialist ways, Hanlon was elected as the senator of Redding.
After their bold arrival at Hoover Dam, the Remnants disappeared as quickly as they came.
Legends of their power spread throughout the southwest, a reminder of why people once feared the sight of vertibirds in the sky.
Despite her departure from the group, the Brotherhood's peace treaty with NCR came as some relief to Veronica.
Though she remained friendly with surface patrols, she was never again permitted to enter the bunker she once called home.
Fearing for the safety of anyone she associated with, she continued her solitary life as a scavenger.
But reports would emerge from Mojave scientists and social workers of old equipment miraculously repaired and research notes mysteriously completed.
The slaughter of the Van Graffs and the Crimson Caravan caused no end of trouble for NCR back West.
Already struggling, NCR's supply lines suffered further as the two caravans withdrew support until the "massacre in the East" was resolved.
Cass lived to see the Courier bring down three armies and by her count, that was three more than she'd expected.
She'd kept quiet about that, though.
Encouraged by the Courier to take her medication regularly, Lily's mind eventually attained a semblance of clarity.
Her memories dulled by the pills, she cast aside the recording of her grandchildren, no longer remembering its significance.
Revitalized by Violetta's brain, Rex eventually learned to balance the memories of his old life with Violetta's experiences among the brutal Fiends.
His mind had difficulty adjusting, but Rex eventually found peace with his new, more vicious self.
The cybernetic canine, gender: female, designation: ROXIE sat in her guard post in X-8.
That is, until her "I'm in heat" programming circumvented her "stay" routine and she loped into the Mojave.
There, she ran across Rex, who had been following the Courier, just as she had. They barked for a while, and realized they had a lot in common.
The two of them constructed a litter of cyberpups, a small army of Boston terrifiers that gnawed and devoured anything in their path.
Though NCR was withdrawing from the region, Boone remained in New Vegas, finding work as a security guard and caravan scout along the highways.
While he might've preferred rejoining his old unit, Boone couldn't bring himself to abandon the city where he'd met his wife.
With its logs cleared and its systems upgraded ED-E remained a vigilant and constant companion to the Courier.
The Followers of the Apocalypse used the information recovered from ED-E on Poseidon Energy, to develop new methods to harness the energy of the sun.
As it had been in the years before the Great War, Big MT... the Big Empty... became home to one of the brightest minds of the 23rd century.
The Courier watched over the Big Empty for years to come, caring for it, and keeping its discoveries safe until they were needed to help others.
Which had always been Big MT's purpose. Past the laboratories and Science, it had always been intended as a place to build the future of all mankind.
The Sink Central Intelligence Unit was impressed by the amount of exploration the Courier had undertaken.
Facilities believed lost, destroyed, or ones that had simply gotten up and walked to new locations had been re-discovered by its intrepid new master.
Internally, the artificial personality debated as to whether it preferred the old management to the new... and concluded that the Courier's thorough approach to research and investigation was admirable and worthy of its respect.
Dr. Mobius continued his research undisturbed in the Forbidden Zone. As much as he had attempted to create better scorpions, he tried the same with humanity, with considerably less success.
These failures didn't bother him overmuch. Once the rush of Mentats wore off, he forgot he had failed in any event.
After all, the bright young mind who had come to visit him in the Forbidden Zone had already exceeded his expectations.
The Sink atop the Dome bustled with the voices of a small town, constantly chirping, arguing, and snarling at each other.
Still, this all happened productively in the interests of its new owner.
The Sink Central Intelligence Unit discovered, despite its inversion code, it was comforted by the sense of community the other personalities gave it.
The Biological Research Station, obsessed with seeding everything in sight, requested a transfer to the X-22 Botanical Garden...
So that it might, in its own words, "sensually fertilize the garden's smooooth contours."
The Garden sent back a polite refusal, saying it had prior commitments with a Vault it had helped infect before the war.
The Book Chute continued to devour all seditious materials until it nearly choked on a paper clip.
It adamantly maintained it was a Chinese paper clip, and the whole thing had been an elaborately orchestrated assassination attempt.
Whatever the reason, it slowed down for a while, carefully appraising each document and clipboard that came to it.
The light switches continued to bicker and flicker.
This persisted until the day someone dropped a flashlight in the Sink, and the two of them united in their hatred of the "showboat.”
One of them eventually transferred to the Lightwave Dynamics Plant - and began a long, unrequited affair with one of the holograms.
The Sink continued to ruthlessly scrub any particulate matter that came near it.
Eventually, it gained access to the Magnetohydraulics Plant and nearly flooded all the Big Empty in an attempt to scrub the crater clean.
Once it learned of the Innovative Toxins Plant, however, it gained new purpose. It sought to develop anti-toxins to flush into its drains and counteract the poisons bleeding into the soil.
The Toaster continued its psychotic spree, reducing all appliances in range to scrap electronics and spare parts.
After one of its more psychotic episodes, however, the other Sink personalities decided enough was enough, and dumped the Toaster in a bathtub.
Sparking and hissing, the Toaster swore its enemies would rue the day when they had bread - and no way to toast it.
Muggy did his best to collect coffee cups, although in his quest, he accidentally trapped himself in Higgs Village. It might have been the end for poor Muggy.
Except... he found it peaceful there, tidying up the kitchens of the Think Tank Professors back when they had been flesh and bone.
Well, except for Dr. O, who was an asshole for having created Muggy in the first place.
Muggy left O's house deliberately dirty, punishing the dishes and cups that lived there in blind revenge for serving Dr. O.
Blind Diode Jefferson, with sounds the Courier brought him, created a symphonic counter-frequency that saved Big MT from sonic invasion in 2910. If you didn't hear about it - good.
It was rumored by the other personalities that he had a brief fling with the light switches.
Although he forgot their names once too often and was soon left in the dark as punishment.
Auto-Doc, always gentle and methodical, kept sewing up the Courier in all the right places when the skin split open from repeated wear and tear.
The Auto-Doc was just glad to have purpose again.
It heard its simpler brothers and sisters who got shipped to the Sierra Madre were bored out of their skulls in that toxic, dead city.
In time, the Auto-Doc found a way to deactivate the Y-17 Trauma Harnesses, releasing the corpses they had held prisoner for almost 200 years.
As the Courier ran through the X-8 facility multiple times, the computers analyzed the test subject's movements.
Rather than performing a superficial observation, they realized the subject barely knew what Communism was - or even what a high school was.
This confused them for a time, until the facility finally realized that its research had... succeeded.
So it let its cyberdogs out into the wastes to help protect small communities from physical aggression rather than communist propaganda.
The infiltration program in X-13 continued to scan for the subject and the Stealth Suit prototype long after the test was over.
Frustrated and unable to find its lost technology, X-13 expanded its network of laser tripwires, sensors, and robobrains out across Big MT.
This glittering blue light beam forest cleanly bisected anything that entered its depths, slicing them into small, segmented parts for easy disposal.
The Courier, organs intact, continued onwards, a little less heavy of step, but with all the organs in the right places.
As they should be. After all, brains can develop a life of their own when left to their own thoughts, and the Courier's brain was more clever than most.
Dr. Klein and the Think Tank remained alive, unaware of the world outside.
They looped through their daily routine, none the wiser about the world beyond... although perhaps "wiser" was the wrong word.
The world outside belonged to the Courier, and if anyone would shape it... well, the Courier had already called dibs.
There is an expression in the Wasteland: "Old World Blues."
It refers to those so obsessed with the past they can't see the present, much less the future, for what it is.
They stare into the what-was, eyes like pilot lights, guttering and spent, as the realities of their world continue on around them.
Science is a long, steady progression into the future. What may seem a sudden event often isn't felt for years, even centuries, to come.
In the times following the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, however, Old World Blues took on a new meaning.
Where once it was viewed as a form of sadness, nostalgia, it became an expression describing the potential for the future.
It can be easy to see Science as evil, technology unchecked as the source of all ills, all misfortunes.
With the Courier at the helm, Science became a beacon for the future. There was Old World Blues, and New World Hope. And hope ruled the day at Big MT.
We could say more, but the stories in the Big Empty speak for themselves.
Now armed with the Transportalponder, the Courier could return to the Dome at any time and crack open the secrets of the Big Empty, one by one.
The Sink sat vigilant, waiting for its master to return, shoes covered in Mojave dust.
You've heard stories of the Sierra Madre Casino. We all have. This story's different than the others. It's all in promise of beginnings. And the ending.
Dog forgot himself, as did the voice that raged within him. After their passing, a new voice spoke within the mutant's shell.
It was difficult for the voice to remember the two it once was... there was the beast, Dog consumed by hunger... ...and the other in reverse... the one consumed by control.
Both were driven by need for the other. The Courier brought them together, somehow, joined the two into one.
All that happened at the Sierra Madre, was a faint memory to the new personality... like a flickering light in the clouds of the mind.
The new voice did not think of the Courier again until the battle at the Divide reached his ears.
The battle between the two couriers, beneath the torn skies and the Old World flag... each bearing a message for the other.
And the mutant prayed the Courier that had saved him... had been saved in return.
Dean Domino, entertainer, singer... thief... had his last show on the Sierra Madre stage.
The heist he spent over two hundred years planning fell apart, just as the first, by underestimating his partner's strength.
Not long after the Courier left the Villa, the lights in the theater shut off, one by one.
Only Dean's Hologram remained on stage, singing silently to an empty room. Still... as consumed as he had been with its riches and ruin, the Sierra Madre had held him captive long ago.
Christine, her mission complete, found new purpose as the Sierra Madre's warden. She watched over it silently - by choice.
Over time, the ghost people came to see her as one of the Holograms. They would watch, silently, as she walked among them.
At times, Christine thought of the Courier, who had kept Elijah's hand from her throat.
The Courier reminded her of the other courier she had met in the Big Empty, and wondered if the two had found each other at last.
She did not think of them again until she heard the legends of the Divide. The Divide, where the two messengers, the two couriers, fought beneath an ancient flag, at the edge of the world.
You've heard of the Sierra Madre Casino.
We all have, the legend, the curses. Some foolishness about it lying in the middle of a City of Dead.
A city of ghosts. Buried beneath a blood-red cloud... a bright, shining monument luring treasure hunters to their doom.
An illusion that you can begin again, change your fortunes. Finding it, though, that's not the hard part.
It's letting go.
And so it was that the conflict between the New Canaanites and the White Legs was finally resolved.
The Courier's involvement had tipped the scale, shifting the fragile balance of power.
Joshua Graham's chilling execution of Salt-Upon-Wounds seared into their minds, the surviving White Legs retreated to the Great Salt Lake.
Unable to shake the memory of their brutal defeat and the Dead Horses' savagery in battle, the White Legs feared further reprisals.
They fled north, out of Utah, into Wyoming. The wilderness was harsh, and the first winter claimed over half the tribe.
When spring came, the survivors parted ways in small bands. And so the White Legs died a quiet, ignominious death.
The Sorrows fought beside Joshua Graham and the Dead Horses, eradicating the threat the White Legs posed to Zion.
Watching as the Courier encouraged Joshua Graham to execute Salt-Upon-Wounds, the Sorrows learned that New Canaan offered no mercy to the wicked.
The Sorrows' transformation from a peaceful, timid tribe into a merciless, warlike people broke Daniel's heart.
Over time, the Sorrows became ever more ruthless in their dealings - even with each other.
Daniel traveled to and from between the New Canaanites and Zion, continuing to plead for a return to the old ways whenever he visited.
Eventually, the Sorrows grew tired of his blather, and turned their backs on him.
Having helped eradicate the White Legs from Zion, the Dead Horses returned to Dead Horse Point in triumph.
They remained neutral toward the Sorrows, but as years went on, there were periods of competitive friction, even violence, between the tribes.
The New Canaanites - Daniel especially - intervened regularly as mediators, but found it difficult to reconcile the tribes' conflicts.
The defeat of the White Legs in Zion marked a turning point in the fortunes of the Happy Trails Caravan Company.
Every two months, the caravan met with the New Canaanites in Zion Valley to trade. Happy Trails soon returned to prosperity.
The vigilance of the Sorrows and Dead Horses in defending southwestern Utah, initially startling to Happy Trails caravans, soon proved a blessing.
The tribes united against the 80s, driving them back from Highway 50, and thus opening yet another trading route for Happy Trails caravans.
Follows-Chalk took the Courier's words to heart and decided that he would behold the sights and sounds of distant lands with his own eyes and ears.
After returning to Dead Horse Point, he quarreled with his family and other tribe members about his ambitions.
One morning, they awoke to discover that Follows-Chalk had set off alone, westward, into the wilderness.
He was never seen again.
Waking Cloud was distraught when she learned of her husband's death, but took comfort from her tribe, and the compassion of the New Canaanites.
She forgave Daniel for having concealed her husband's fate from her, and learned to accept his fate. When her grief faded, she took a husband from the Dead Horse tribe.
At her bidding, he stayed close to home.
With the White Legs crushed, Joshua Graham led the Sorrows and Dead Horses in tearing apart and burning the corpses of their enemies.
He set about training his army in the "Way of the Canaanite," and soon the New Canaanites and tribes of Zion were feared well into the Mojave.
Legends of the Burned Man grew even more depraved, and terrifying.
For years after the defeat of the White Legs, Daniel did his best to minister to the Sorrows' spiritual needs.
Try as he might, he could not hold back the tribe's increasing militancy and reverence of Joshua Graham.
Demoralized, he returned to his family at Dead Horse Point. His failures haunted him for the rest of his days.
And with that, the Courier walked out of the history of the tribes of Zion and back to the gathering storm of the Mojave Wasteland.
ED-E, given second life by the machines of the Divide, freed by the Courier, continued his quest west, to Navarro......or what remained of what the eyebot considered "home."
Whether he found his homeland or not, his road is unknown. It may be the journey meant more than the destination - just as his counterpart in the Mojave had learned.
Before leaving, he sent a coded signal to his original in the Mojave, passing along what the Courier had taught him in the Divide.
With that last farewell, he set off, carrying the song of Old World hope with him, which had given him Strength and purpose on his journey.
And no matter what, he knew there would be a second home to return to, Navarro or not - and that his creator would be proud.
Hopeville burned lightless in the night, invisible fires of radiation scorching it from within and without. It is said a man still walked its streets, with a tattered jacket, an Old World flag etched on the back...
He remained there, perhaps as punishment for the scars he left on the wastes - or a reminder of a history he could not forget.
For Ulysses... his journey was over. The Courier had been the end of his road.
The Courier, with the aid of Yes Man, drove both the Legion and the NCR from Hoover Dam, securing New Vegas’ independence from both factions.
With Mr. House out of the picture, part of the Securitron army was diverted to the Strip to keep order. Any chaos on the streets was ended, quickly.
Chaos became uncertainty, then acceptance, with minimal loss of life. New Vegas assumed its position as an independent power in the Mojave.
As they did before against the Enclave, the NCR/Brotherhood of Steel alliance Sun brokered would join forces to try and overthrow her.
With the NCR more focused on taking back their territories of power instead of dismantling the upgraded securitrons as the Brotherhood urged, the union would soon shatter once again.
Preferring neither the best of the NCR nor the worst of the Legion, the Courier was the woman responsible for a truly independent New Vegas.
She had removed Mr. House from power over the Strip and broken the influence of the NCR and Caesar’s Legion in the Mojave Wasteland.
With the few remaining independent supply lines feeding the Mojave, goods and essentials ran scarce.
As tensions ran high, the wasteland would eventually consume itself. All its inhabitants had one person to thank for this: Sun Vulture...
The Maw of the Mojave.
And so the Courier's road came to an end... for now.
In the new world of the Mojave Wasteland, fighting continued, blood was spilled, and many lived and died - just as they had in the Old World.
Because war... war never changes.