#i’ve considered this as one of the ‘‘good’’ endings for vulp in my courier’s story but it’s HIGHLY variable ofc

[gecskeleton]

i read a fic years ago that loosely covered this concept but sadly never finished it (to my knowledge. it is now lost to the sands of time) and recently i’ve been rotating it in my mind again: what if vulpes realised that without the courier’s help caesar would surely succumb to his illness. maybe not before seeing to the legion’s second and final attempt at conquering the dam, but their chances of success on that front wane by the second. he knows his position within the legion depends almost entirely upon caesar’s partiality. he knows that with caesar gone lanius would have no impediment to succession of the throne which would bring their organisational differences to a nightmarish unavoidable head. vulpes would basically sooner abandon ship than pledge loyalty to that particular man-made monster. so he decides to cut his losses and make a deal with the courier: they personally (with or without arcade’s involvement) see to caesar’s death in a manner that sort of kind of still carries “honour” (whatever that means to him is up for debate) and vulpes will take care of the rest. lanius will have to be a group effort with the courier’s allies. of course, a courier who wasn’t willing to aid the legion in the first place is bound to have some doubts. like if vulpes is the last surviving member of caesar’s inner circle then wouldn’t that just leave the role open for him? if they’re going to level the foundation of the army it has to be permanent. vulpes has to make very clear where his allegiance lies. which, obviously, is with himself. the AMICUS MEUS, INIMICUS INIMICI MEI quest where you’re like 85% likely to be double-crossed by that insufferable twink

[florbelles]

all of G & Y for the queen of new vegas, baby 😈🔥

thank you legend!!

— G. GORGEOUS.

i. what is their most attractive external feature?

it’s not something joss has given a lot of thought; she always understood that she was considered beautiful, and that usually meant she was bait for unsuspecting travelers who would stay at her father’s shack of an inn. the appeal is all in the facial composition, though — she didn’t have clean hair or skin or pre-war clothes, then.

ii. what is the most attractive part of their personality?

she learned early on how to manipulate people by saying the right thing, asking the right questions. dispensing the appropriate amount of approval at the opportune moment, withholding it just long enough to make it feel earned. to someone intimately familiar with how she operates, it’s not necessarily a charming attribute, but it’s what gets her what she needs and what draws people in to begin with

she’s also funny as hell, if your tastes run to the morbid or at the expense of others.

iii. what benefits come with being their friend?

she will not put out a hit on you!

full benefits of all her connections. an act if you want it. resources if you need them. the run of the strip and goodwill in freeside. exemption from getting kicked out of the tops if you’re winning too much ( swank hates this one ).

iv. what parts of them do they like and dislike?

well, she thinks she’s hilarious, thanks. she likes that she’s ruthless and cutthroat; it doesn’t really occur to her that she shouldn’t have to be, she just appreciates that it serves her, that it’s how she survived this long. she likes the way she looks; she’s not vain, but she likes the advantage it gives her. she’s proud of the fact that almost everything she knows is self-taught.

she dislikes that she’s so embittered, that she can’t let anything go. she didn’t really think about it when it was driving her — she’s going to get away from her father, she’s going to find her sisters, she’s going to ( from her perspective ) free new vegas — but when she’s left as a rebel without a cause she just has to sit with it, and she hates that. not enough to talk about it or do anything with it, even with her closest confidants she’ll never feel free to show what she perceives as weakness or vulnerability that way, but still. she wishes it were different, sometimes ( which, perhaps ironically, leaves her even more embittered and usually drives her out of vegas to go wander the wastes before she misdirects it more than she already has; she already slaughtered the strip once, she can’t do it again, it didn’t rid her of her anger last time ).

v. what parts of others do they envy?

relatedly, she envies anyone who is ( comparatively ) without baggage, insofar as that exists in the wastes, less in the sense of what’s happened to them but how they’ve coped with it and processed it. people who can be satisfied with what they have, who don’t have an anger or restlessness that consumes them. she thinks sometimes she would have been happier roaming the wastes all her life, and she envies those who do, to an extent, but that’s a thought she has the luxury to have when she actually has security & companionship for the first time in her life ( which she does not, in fact, walk away from despite technically having the option, so the insincerity of that envy is apparent even to her, if she’s being honest with herself ). is the appeal of the idea partly that benny absolutely abhors it to the point of bumping off others for harboring these potentially dangerous sentiments? yes. almost entirely.

— Y. YOU.

i. how old were you when you created them?

twenty-one. she was older than i was at the time. i now understand she is a fetus.

ii. what inspired you to create them?

unlike some of my other characters, joss was originally purely the result of in-game choices and mechanics. i just wanted a real bitch of a courier, not initially from the perspective of a fleshed out character but in the sense that she would take every chaotic asshole option available. lose to ringo at caravan? shoot him. end up shooting the whole entire bar and being the butcher of goodsprings. get villified by the ncr before even reaching primm. boone won’t speak to her because of this. break into his hotel room. shoot him. kill jeannie anyway because she found the receipts. shoot that guy who won the legion lottery because she thinks it’s an actual lottery and he’s gonna have cash. nope. just open fire on vulpes & company.

i started to develop a loose moral code for her by the time i reached freeside and adjusted my gameplay accordingly, but that is, in fact, her tragic origin story.

iii. were they different when they were first created?

honestly, given the above writeup, not as much as you’d think. obviously she’s different in the sense that character/developmental/background reasons now exist for her behaviors and choices, and a few things have been tweaked accordingly, but those were more additions than revisions to the extremely vague concept that already existed. she’s the same old very evil karma bitch she ever was.

iv. do you enjoy writing them more than other characters?

i don’t know if i would say more, but she’s one of my favorites ( there are obviously other characters i write more frequently now, especially in terms of what actually gets posted to tumblr dot com, but i originally wrote for her a good deal ). in terms of gameplay and early-stage development, yes, by an absolute landslide. her first playthrough is probably to this day the most fun i’ve had in my first runthrough of a game.

v. what’s your favorite thing about them?

exactly her aforementioned origins, actually! she’s a loose canon in every sense, just a real liability, but she is, horrifyingly, running this shit now. she also lets me play with a lot of my favorite tropes ( the femme fatale, the dark messiah, god save us from the queen ).

[kogo-dogo]

ooh 5, 9, 43 maybe??

5. What are your fanfic pet peeves? Do they have a huge effect on whether or not you decide to read something?

I can’t read things that are improperly formatted. If something isn’t spaced correctly or is an utter block of text, my brain just shuts off. It could be the most innovative, well-written work to have every spilled from human hands, but the inside of my head would just be angry and afraid and flip the “off” switch. Said brain just expects a pattern, and when that pattern is broken? I can’t do it.

I’m also not huge on most AUs. I’m what a lot of people would have called in the olden days a “canon elitist.” I’m all for flubbing things if you can make it make sense in the context of the original material, but I’m always wary of AUs. I blame the fact I was very heavily into the Elder Scrolls fandom when Mog Mod was popular and everyone’s Dunmer was a goth boy in leather chaps.

That said, not all AUs are made equal. Some people know how to write in-character and compelling content. Sometimes I’m guilty of it myself (I say, while gesturing violently to HRV). I’m just very, very leery of them.

9. Tag 3 fic writers you think are underrated/unknown in the fandom/fanfiction community.

The fics I have in mind that are unknown are fics that are literally lost. I think it’s kind of interesting to have Secret Knowledge of Hidden Fics, so I’m gonna share those instead.

- There was an illustrated(?) fic that was lost when the PlanetElderScrolls forum was destroyed, which was a screenshot-with-story fic written by a guy named Captain Jordan. About... Captain Jordan. He was a ship-sailing pirate who hung out in the Sea of Ghosts in Morrowind with a rag-tag group of non-lore compliant friends and kept ending up in weirder and weirder predicaments. Glitches that happened in-game were treated as “canon” to his adventure, and included a whale that jumped so high out of the water that it flew away, a Nord named Cjad who repeatedly died from falling from the crow’s nest, and his Khajiit and Bosmer companions getting into a raging fist-fight while a castle burned around them. It was... not lore compliant, but it was fucking hilarious because the author had one of the best senses of humor I’ve seen in writing.

- A New Vegas crack fic I found on the Fallout Kink Meme back in the day. It was about Vulpes Inculta infiltrating a slumber party with all of the most famous females of the Mojave, while dressed in a bad wig and pajamas. Throughout the whole thing, he was kept perfectly in-character, and so while all of these women are talking about their crushes and painting their nails, he is trying to piece together sensitive information from their conversations. It ends with him becoming convinced they’re oracles because they’re using a paper fortune teller to “see the future,” and he covertly informs Caesar that they’ve predicted he will do “naked Twister with the whore, Santiago.”

- My holy grail that I hope to find again someday: The Vulpes/Deacon fic. It wasn’t a ship fic, but was basically a redemption arc for Vulpes Inculta. I remember he joined a caravan after the Legion was destroyed at the insistence of Courier Six, and marched eastward until he wound up in the Commonwealth. Once there, he’d already realized how misguided he was, and while stopping at... that one settlement that hates synths? He finds a tape for “Join the Railroad” in a trashcan, and is inspired to actually seek them out. The rest of the fic is Vulpes trying to atone for his life as a tyrant and slaver by liberating synths and fighting the Institute (who he considered a second coming of the Legion). He becomes friends with Deacon, and hilarity ensues as... they’re both expert spies but have vastly different personalities and approaches. It was very good and I would pay money to have it back again, but it seems like whoever wrote it wiped it clean from the internet.. and it was unknown enough that I’ve yet to even find somebody who also read it.

43. Talk about a positive experience with fanfiction or the fanfiction community that you will always remember.

As much as I roll my eyes at the “goth boy Morrowind” time of the fandom back in the late 2000s, the Elder Scrolls fandom was actually very encouraging. I was a sixteen year old surrounded by grown adults in the forum I frequented, and I would write some of the worst, most cliche, garbage stuff known to man... and all of these adults would just applaud me and clap me on the back and congratulate me and tell me to keep going and chase that dream.

The same community that harbored all of these bizarre Mary-Sue Nerevarines and goth clubs in daedric shrines were some of the most affirming people I’ve been around. In their eyes, this was all for fun and personal enjoyment, so you can write and do whatever, so long as it didn’t hurt anyone and it made you happy. And if you wanted to put a Dremora in raver gear or dress up your Khajiit like he shopped at Hot Topic? Fine.

Those people are the entire reason I started taking writing seriously in the first place, and I adore them even over a decade later.

[sini-sketchrility]

It's not finished YET, but... this is my current favorite OC, Lex. In my latest playthrough of New Vegas I’ve decided I’m going to be evil with honor; In my thoughts and stories for my Courier 6, Lex, she’s a stone cold bitch with a secret agenda, and the whole reason she is the way she is is because as a child her town was hit by raiders, and her father tried to get away with her, but was shot down. She herself was near blinded by the ash from the burning farms and buildings. She woke up in a Followers of the Apocalypse station, battered and bruised and with a broken leg, but alive. The doctor present at that moment asked her her name. Alexandra. He grew fond of her, and they became good friends. He even gave her his glasses, and she was lucky enough that the script was close enough to what she needed that she could see almost as well as she could before! Eventually he started calling her Alexus. Unbeknownst to her - and evidently everyone else too - her doctor had become obsessed with Caesar. Beginning as a mere fascination with his cruelty and cunning, growing to admiration, and then finally pure idolization - as if he were truly the son of Mars and the true Caesar. He came into contact with Vulpes Inaculta, who convinced him to kill everyone at his encampment in order to prove himself capable of joining the Legion. With careful planning (though the fact that there were only five other Followers in addition to two guards, and about 3 other patients aside from Lex who herself was only 13 didn’t hurt), he lured the guards away and killed them, then killed the rest of the followers plus the other 3 patients using one of the guards’ machinegun. Vulpes told him that he ought to leave one person alive in order to spread news of his deeds around and make people fear him  AND add to the power of the name of Caesar (though didn’t tell him that a child wouldn’t bring much considering it would take a real fucking bastard to kill a child, even in the wasteland), and that worked out in his favor because the only person he would have had difficulty killing would have been Lex - though push come to shove he probably would have. Lex hid behind a crate during the massacre, but was easily found. She was panicked, but oddly enough, not crying. When he found her, he was bloody and had already dropped the gun. He got on his knees, gave her a hug and sat with her for roughly an hour, explaining what happened, why he did it, why he wanted to join Caesar’s Legion, and why he wasn’t going to kill her. He said he’d take her with him if he could, but this was the next best thing. He got up, started walking away, and then stopped a few feet away. He turned back around, smiled one last time, took off his glasses, and tossed them to her.

She wiped the blood off of them, put them on, and after grabbing a bag and filling it as full as she could carry with supplies, water, and food, and taking from the other guard and a doctor a 9mm and a knife, set out to find the next closest town. 

After the doctor attacked the Followers encampment, she wasn't the same. It was a trauma twofer. She started merc work around 17, as soon as she was physically able, and began calling herself Lex. Eventually she started doing Courier work to make ends meet when Merc work was slow. Traveling around with Veronica after Benny shot her - and Veronica managed to soften her up a bit - Lex secretly can't wait for the day when she comes face to face with him again in the Legion. "I used to be called Alexandra. Now I'm called Lex. But you... you called me Alexus."