The Universal Fallout 3 Board FAQ *Read First / Potential Spoilers*

Two points to make. First, I have no problem with the 20% health requirement of Nerd Rage. It's very useful for my character with a strength of 4 (adds 60 lbs to her encumbrance) when doing loot runs. Furthermore, first, the only reason I heal over 20% is to get rid of the annoying heart throb noise, and second, unless you're playing on harder difficulties or fighting particularly hard monsters (at which point you should be fighting, not doing loot runs) it's not like you're actually going to lose 10-15% of your health in one hit. Also, the additional 50% DR means that last 20% is effectively the last 30% (exact amount depends on your DR before adding the perk).

Second, where in the game does it "clearly state" that Fawkes is female? If you read the Chief Physician entry that says D624 is one of the female specimens, and think that because Fawkes' cell identifies him/her/it as D624 makes Fawkes female, you are wrong (which is the only thing I can vaguely correlate to Fawkes being female). If you read all the entries, you note that specimen B440 died and had an autopsy, yet the cell labeled "B440" has a living centaur in it, specimen C376 lost most of his male indicators and his skin hardened, yet cell C376 contains an obviously-male human with normal skin, cell B164 contains not one female, but two females and one male, none of whom have lost their sex indicators or have hardened skin, and finally, the entries state all five specimens were scheduled to be terminated because they had severe bouts of rage and anxiety. Combine these with the first entry talking about "continual pressure from Vault-Tec" and it seems obvious the specimens the cells are labeled for are 200-years dead, and Fawkes' history has nothing to do with those.

Well, no, the correllation of D624 = female is not nearly enough, unless we have evidence specimen D624 = Fawkes. You might as well say my mother was female so Fawkes is female--makes just as much sense.

The Chief Physician says all the surviving specimens succumbed to the same rage problems, so if D624 became human in mind, she did so after that note was taken. It's possible she did so before the mutants escaped (if they did), but it's just as possible she did so later. If she did so later, there's no reason to assume the mutants would have forced her back into the same cell as she was in before. Further, it's unlikely they would have immediately noticed the difference when escaping, giving us the same lack of reason to assume they would have put her into the same cell when they did notice.

Additionally, unless there's something elsewhere in the game, there's no evidence the V87 experiments are the source of the DC mutants. It's just as possible someone else was playing with the FEV and created the original mutants there. The original mutants could have moved into V87 much later, and given the extreme level of radiation they are conveniently immune to, it would make sense for them to move there so that only the ghouls could bother them. Since there is FEV equipment in V87, the mutants would have started using it to create new mutants (either because it's easier than moving back and forth between V87 and wherever the original FEV equipment is, or because the other equipment was destroyed).

Regardless of whether the mutants started in V87 or elsewhere, there's no particular reason Fawkes couldn't be one of the more recent converts. Further, given the generally violent nature of the mutants, I would be inclined to think they would have just shot D624 long before 200 years had passed. Likewise, I was surprised they hadn't already killed Fawkes and assumed that meant Fawkes was recently-created. Further, there's no specific amount of time it takes to say "I don't know how long I've been here". Without a clock, I don't know how long I've been typing this response, and after only a few days inside a vault, anyone would lose track. Push this out even a year, and you would easily get that response. It's not like the player asks for an order of magnitude, plus Fawkes says its entire life was in that cell, so it wouldn't have any concept of days and years. To a 2-year old, 2 years is forever just the same as 200 years is forever to a 200-year old.

I agree it's possible Fawkes = D624, but seeing as it is, at best, a toss-up, and more realistically a remote possibility, I'm not buying it.