#jacksothereye

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In which I don’t celebrate Brendan enough and I’m about to make that everyone’s problem. 

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Important. 

He swim. 

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In which I tried to encapsulate Muds from back during his raider days and it’s basically the best? 

This garbage man. What’s in there? I love it. 

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After living in my Overboss AU for… I don’t even know, it was a while, dudes. Like a month? BUT now I’m back on my canon play through for Juaco and that meant an impromptu examination of my pose mods and snapping a shot every time Juaco’s expression lined up.  

This boy, I care for him.

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Muds has never really cared for animals, but my decision to make him and Dogmeat a canon team came from the fact that I loved traveling with Dogmeat that much. Objectively, Dogmeat is too good for Muds, but that’s just the thing about that boy, it doesn’t matter to him. 

I don’t know one person that doesn’t love Dogmeat. Even people who don’t play Fallout know of the character. He’s been classed as the best video game dog both officially and in twitter hashtag arguments. In the history of fictional good boys, he’s among the finest. River’s passing is so sad, but man, what a legacy to leave behind. <3

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This is the part where I share things about Muds because this is my house and I do what I want. The following contains a lotta headcanons about synths and how they work - or at least, very specifically how older synths like my boy here work. I’m not kidding. There’s a lot. That’s why it’s under a cut, cuz I’m nice.

Here we go!

Muds, otherwise known as ‘Jeremy’, otherwise known as J2-67 was made in 2233. Considering that Gen 3 synths were first pushed into production in 2227, he was a part of a technological learning curve as Institute scientists worked to make these synths as ‘human-adjacent’ as they could be. 

For this reason, Muds has a lot of older tech inside him that was never switched out. His skeleton is made from a metallic alloy that far more closely resembles the Gen 2 framework rather than a human skeleton. This makes Muds disproportionately heavy in contrast to his otherwise lanky appearance, as well as making it damn near impossible for the man to break a limb. 

His visual system still operates with Gen 2 synth ocular units (plus several software upgrades that took place over the years). Their appearance is hidden via the use of ‘caps’, which ultimately work like contacts to give them their human appearance. This can cause issues like the sitch we see in the above photos - where someone got himself punched in the head hard enough that one of the caps popped off. 

Of the original line of synths that J2-67 was produced in (of which there were seven), only two remain. Muds in particular was kept in operation due to a unique ‘bug’ in his circuitry that allowed his Random Access Memory to remain functional even after the input of his recall code. He could still be incapacitated, sure, but his primary faculties were left intact enough to reload his original personality disk and start fresh time and time again. (He has, on record, been reset three times since his creation).  

Unbeknownst to the Institute, this same bug prevented Muds from truly being reset in a conventional sense. Though his memories were indeed wiped and reset to the default after each recall, fragments have remained from his ‘past lives’. These are not intact memories, but more like incomplete bits of data that compiled over the years and have caused issues in his programming. 

Along those lines - Muds has been a ‘liberated’ synth for about a decade now! But because of this, he has had no access to any software upgrades from the Institute. Certain programming faults have gone unchecked for years, which has made Muds subject to random verbal stutters and visual ticks. On top of this, his body will often inconsistently ‘soft reset’, which leaves him inoperable for short periods of time. 

Like all synths, Muds technically does not require food or sleep - yet for the purposes of personal canon, I chalk that up to programming. Gen 3 synths are designed to think they require food and sleep in order to maintain the illusion of humanity. Can you starve a synth? Sure, but you risk their programming convincing them that they are dying of starvation and shorting out, even if their body is fundamentally fine. Even with Muds’ self-awareness when it comes to him being a synth, it took him a long time to ‘train’ himself into believing he doesn’t need food. He still chooses to sleep, however. Because he likes it. 

Necessity or not, food and sleep still play a function in providing Muds with the energy he needs to keep operating. For the sake of all-around coverage, I say that synths also have the means to convert both solar power AND ambient radiation into useful energy that they can use throughout their day. 

When it comes to the radiation thing, while synths are designed to be immune to it - that energy has to go *somewhere*. Synths can absorb and convert that radiation into energy to a point, but over-exposure means their bodies will have to find a way to flush the excess. What does this mean? They shit themselves, Jim. They are going to have a righteous meeting with the lavatory later.*

Muds’ original personality disk was sourced from a pre-war human named Jeremy. Muds is keenly aware of this, and he *hates* it. Several attempts have been made over the years to separate himself from who he calls ‘the other guy’. Efforts included but were not limited to: joining the raiders, adopting a new name, getting tattoos, and talking ‘to Jeremy’ in his head like a separate person - but in reality he’s only doing exactly what the OG Jeremy would have done in this situation. It’s really quite sad. 

Like all Gen 3’s, Muds is an absolute fiend for Fancy Lads Snack Cakes. 

*No one wants to use Muds’ outhouse anyway. Look at it.  

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The lighting was nice and this boy is nice. 

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Bonus back shot of these shorts heyooooo.

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Brendan: You’re telling me you’d just shoot a guy while he was asleep?  Muds: B, I’d shoot him if he was celebrating Palm Sunday - I like being first. 

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I resisted Dave’s Pose Mod for a really long time, because 300+ options is a lot for an indecisive goblin like myself. But last night was the night. 

I can only imagine how many times the people of Goodneighbor have looked above the Memory Den to see Juaco posing at nothing. Jet does strange things to people, you know. 

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Let’s face it, we all went to Far Harbor for the high.