Moira Brown (Fallout 3)



Moira Brown is a merchant and sorta-mechanic who may believe that she is, in fact, a unicorn from the Cretaceous Period. That was a very important epoch in human history, after all. She arrived in-game on 10/14/10 or thereabouts, real-time, and currently lives in [FIFTY POINTS FROM GRYFFINDOR FOR TOXIC LEVELS OF DERPY GOOD CHEER D:]

age: 24

origins: Fallout 3

app link: oh geeze I should resave it to her journal~

hmd: Yes please! Leave notes''' here. '''Comment Screening OFF, Anonymous ON, IP Logging OFF.

played by: fluffysparkle, a living breathing human being with an actual Livejournal right here.

Setting
In the beginning--no, that's not right. A long, long time ago, in a--that's not it, either. From the dawn of time we came, moving--aarrrgh! Look, it's like this.

...War. War never changes. But not all of us are soldiers. For some of us, war looks a lot like making a living fixing toasters in a hollowed-out town built over a nuclear bomb site.

Pretend with me a moment. Envision a world where the Bay of Pigs totally happened (ideologically speaking), and in terms of social structure and mores, it is permanently the 1961 ...Of...The Future! Sorry, Pop, no flying cars, but we do have jetpacks and household robots to do the cleaning for us.

Or we did. Before the bombs dropped.

The Fallout series is a science-fiction alternate history fueled by 1950's Americana, a world where Wonder Bread was good for you, McCarthyism was your patriotic duty, and everyone's parents said their prayers at night in separate beds, under the covers with the lights off.

Fallout history holds that China, not Russia, was the major opposing nuclear superpower of the day. Tensions escalated to the proverbial Global Thermonuclear War. (2070's, in game-time, if I recall correctly.) Nearly everyone was wiped out. It was the end of life as we knew it, and the beginning of life in the Wasteland.

The Vaults were America's Answer! To The Nuclear Threat! A series of large-scale underground bunkers funded by VaulTec, the Vaults were designed to provide all the comforts of home for upwards of a thousand per facility, depending on geographic location.

That was how it was supposed to be.

In reality, the Vaults were part of a massive government project/social experiment to test how citizens would react to various conditions of the apocalypse. Vault 13 was rigged with a faulty water purifier. In Vault 106, psychoactive drugs were released into the air recyclers soon after the doors were sealed. Vault 101 gave complete control to the Overseer. Legend has it that one Vault is populated entirely by clones of one man, all named Gary...

In Fallout 3, the player is centrally located in an area spanning the Maryland/Virginia corridor near Washington, D.C.--a demilitarized zone crawling with supermutants, slavers, mirelurks, and similar big nasty things that all want to eat you. Such towns as still exist are sparse, small, and far apart.

There are no governments, only factions. The Enclave will tell you differently and promise you a down-home slice of the good ol' red white and blue, but they're all a bunch of robots anyway. Really. Just ask President John Henry Eden. God bless America, and good luck getting out alive. You'll need it.

Moira is an NPC, first encountered by the player in the survivor city of Megaton, which gets its name from the undetonated atomic bomb sticking up from the mud in the middle of town. Don't worry, everyone’s sure it's a dud. Besides, the local Children of Atom cult worships the thing, and they helped build the town, so...

Note: Megaton sprang up over the bomb site after the Overseer of 101 refused to let anyone in or out of the Vault, including his own citizens. The Overseer eventually approved minor trade expeditions to Megaton, but details on the situation are scarce and password-locked to his personal terminal.

Personality
If Kaylee from Firefly were the sole survivor of a Reaver attack, she might have turned out a lot like Moira.

She’s an eternal optimist with the heart of a researcher, and just slightly loony. Raised in the scrap-built town of Megaton, she's learned how to barter, borrow, find, and make everything from food to furnishings. She knows how to put together assorted broken crap to make something useful--or at least something that runs. The Rock-It Launcher, a gun made from an old vacuum cleaner that slings toasters with the force of a small cannon, is a prime example of this. While Moira can't reliably build weapons, and is not some kind of scary ninja gunsmith, she can fix or mod them pretty well, depending on what she has on hand.

In Fallout 3, Moira lives above her shop, Craterside Supply, which she never leaves. She dispenses sunny, quirky advice to all customers, and will try to convince the player to share her dream of completing The Wasteland Survival Guide. As a minor character, Moira's family background is basically a blank slate. Going reasonably from canon, she's probably related to the Vargas family in some way. She would have had as ordinary a childhood as possible for someone who grew up scavenging a post-nuclear hell for survival, but she seems fixated on the idea of the Wasteland as dangerous, so it's possible moving to Megaton wasn't all sunshine and roses giant killer radscorpions.

She basically wants for everyone to get along and not get killed. The fact that she sometimes contributes to others' survival problems, however, is completely lost on her.

Abilities & Weaknesses
STRENGTH 3 PERCEPTION 3 ENDURANCE 9 CHARISMA 7 INTELLIGENCE 7 AGILITY 5 LUCK 6

Weaknesses:

Moira is NOT A FIGHTER. AT ALL. She likes the idea of guns and knows how they should work, but she's a wimp and a lousy shot. Crying behind the counter with her hands over her face is her idea of a good defense. Throwing things that explode or spew fire (hopefully at the bad guys) and THEN crying behind the counter is Moira's idea of a really, really good defense.

She is super-cheerful, and she always has something good to say about everyone. Yes, everyone. She always initially likes everyone she meets. Always. Dramatically not Perceptive, she’s slow to notice if someone doesn’t like her back; breaking it to her can take days, weeks, months…forever… She could lie, but it doesn't occur to her.

She's pretty bright--she's been taking things apart and putting them back together most of her life. Although she's better at taking things apart. Heh. When confronted with computers, especially ones as advanced as she’d likely find on Sacrosanct, she’d assess their physical structure and try scrapping them for parts. Hacking isn't her expertise, unless you mean literally. She can type well enough to keep a computer log of The Wasteland Survival Guide, so she knows what an interface is and how to use one, but she's also the kind of person who is convinced that "PASSWORD 4321" is the best password ever, no one will ever guess it.

She never suspects anyone and would never for a moment believe (or understand) that someone was lying to her. Her survival instinct is permanently broken in the diction of “Ooh, a shiny!”.

Strengths

Moira’s pretty smart, with a head full of trivia from both before and after the War, but she’s so unperceptive that it's mostly useless info, or she can't locate it when she needs it, or she'll get some critical facts mixed up at just the wrong moment. She can repair things well, and she could probably pick the hell out of locks if it ever occurred to her to try.

Moira is like a happy-go-lucky savant variation of McGuyver: she could make a frag grenade out of chewing gum and a toaster. Of course, being both weak and clumsy, she’d then likely fumble it and KILL US ALL. Happily, her decent Luck helps rescue her from her worst accidents. Most of the time.

She can Endure a lot and is often heard to remark "Gee, maybe that's a bad one," while sporting cuts or burns that should really alarm any sane person. Understandably, she knows a decent amount of first aid, including stitches. Heal thyself, right? This helps her survive, despite her curiosity re: all things explosive and burny, combined with her amazing lack of preservation instincts and general inability to tell when she's in real danger.

Character Relationships
I liked the CR Chart T_T; but I'll gladly duplicate one here, as soon as I've got one.

You're only as strong as you feel, okay? Super!

Free Space
THEY CAN TAKE OUR SPACE, BUT THEY WILL NE'ER TAKE OUR VODKA

UNSUCCESSFUL ANGER MANAGEMENT

what rehab

FREEDOM.