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For other uses of the word "Yangtze", see Yangtze (disambiguation). |
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Little Yangtze is a location in Big MT in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Old World Blues.
Background[]
Pre-War[]
Before the Great War, Executive Order 99066 by the US President was used to round up and imprison Chinese and Chinese-American citizens in concentration camps across the United States in response to the Sino-American War and widespread suspicions of Communist spies infiltrating the country. "Little Yangtze" was one such concentration camp, however instead of simply being imprisoned indefinitely in horrific conditions, the prisoners brought there were used as test subjects for experiments conducted by the researches of Big MT.[1] Among the Think Tank executives, they outright considered the camp and its inhabitants as a "human farm."[2]
On its very first day of operations, the camp was filled with three entire trainloads of prisoners, some of who had a very limited grasp of English and had to be forced with nightsticks to carry out the soldiers' commands.[3] It is unclear if the inmates brought to Little Yangtze were actually citizens of the United States, as they may very well have been abducted Chinese citizens or genuine PLA infiltrators.[1][4][5]
The squalor of the camp, as well as the intentional abductions of inmates for research purposes and brain extraction (one of Big MT's ongoing projects at the time involved Robobrain technology), resulted in constant tension among the prisoners and their guards. With no recourse or hope of salvation, there were constant attempts made to escape. Any complaints about the abductions were dismissed by the camp commandant as superstitions about ghosts and punished with three weeks in solitary confinement.[6] The constant escapes and resulting "processing," as well as being forced to pull triple shifts had a negative impact on the soldiers watching the camp and their morale. Eventually, the camp commandant requisitioned freshly prototyped explosive collars for a trial run: all prisoners were fitted with one, designed to detonate and instantly kill them if they crossed the camp perimeter.[7]
Post-War[]
Following the nuclear apocalypse, though the military abandoned Big MT en masse, they left behind the prisoners still locked up in the camp. Still caged by both the wire fencing and their collars, the radioactive fallout near the camp eventually ghoulified the survivors. With few prospects of ever leaving the camp again, they were forced to eke out an existence for over two centuries.
In the late 23rd century, the rogue Brotherhood elder Elijah rediscovered Big MT while searching for powerful weapons to aid in his revenge against the New California Republic. When he came upon Little Yangtze, he elected to take control of it as his base of operations in the crater. During his stay in Big MT, Elijah used his expert technical skill to reverse engineer the technology used in creating the collars, exploiting the captive ghoul prisoners as test subjects to ascertain the frequency he sought, often with deadly results for the prisoners when he failed; these experiments would eventually lead to the creation of the explosive collars that Elijah would later use in his plan to break into the Sierra Madre.[8] For being locked up in a small metal pen for decades and treated horribly, many of the prisoners have become insane and suicidal. The truly desperate would often rush the gates whenever they spotted Elijah leaving his lab and predictably exploding the moment they left the perimeter.[9]
Sometime before 2281, the Circle of Steel assassin Christine Royce was sent after Elijah to eliminate him for his crimes against the Brotherhood. Christine tracked him all the way to Big MT where she found him at Little Yangtze. From a sniping position in a building opposite from the watchtower Elijah used as his lab, she observed him. At one point, Elijah noticed Christine from sunlight glinting off the scope of her rifle.[10]
A short time later, Christine took an opportunity to try and assassinate Elijah, but failed and he retaliated by forcing some of the ghoul survivors to charge the assassin, detonating their collars and knocking her unconscious, to be retrieved by robots and taken away to the Y-17 medical facility.[11]
Escapees[]
Despite the apparent hopelessness of their situation, there was a couple of prisoners that managed to escape from Little Yangtze alive: Number 27 and Number 34. Getting out of the fenced-in area sometime before 2281. they remained in the nearby hills overlooking the prison camp, possibly intending to help more of their trapped fellows.[12]
Layout[]
Prison camp[]
Situated northeast of the Big MT west tunnel and southeast of the construction site in the ordinal northwest side of Big MT, the location consists of a fenced-in area with four gates. The interior is filled with field tents containing rusted bunk beds, with a number of makeshift graves outside.
Building[]
North of the camp is a collapsed building containing Christine's CoS silencer rifle, a dose of steady and ammunition on the second floor.
Watchtower[]
The camp has a single watchtower, which was used by Elijah as a workshop during his first days at Big MT. When he was forced to move due to the run-in with Christine, he left behind his LAER, alongside deactivated bomb collars and other work materials he used to crack the bomb collars.
Notable loot[]
- Christine's CoS silencer rifle - a unique variant of the sniper rifle, found on the second floor of the ruined building to the northwest against the camp fence, next to an ammunition box and one steady. Once the rifle is picked up, three lobotomites will spawn from the surrounding area.
- Elijah's advanced LAER - a unique variant of the LAER, found on the second-floor balcony of the Little Yangtze watchtower near the east gate of Little Yangtze.
- Recipes - Survival skill book - In the first tent on the right under the first bunk bed on the right, after entering the prison camp's east entrance.
- Book Chute Upgrade: Mulching - Found inside the watchtower, leaning against a coffee maker.
- Deactivated bomb collars and broken detonator - Found in the Little Yangtze watchtower.
- Protonic inversal axe - Carried by Number 34 and Number 27.
- Five Proton throwing axes - Found in the watchtower.
Notes[]
- With high volume, the sound from the speakers that emit signals from Dead Money on the loudspeakers above each gate can be heard, as well as whispers when standing around the makeshift gravestones. These whispers occur with most graveyards, and the sound is listed below the "Effects" category in the audio settings. One example of these faint sounds is at the Goodsprings Cemetery, where the same whispers will be heard.
- There is a Sierra Madre poster on the floor in the watchtower.
- Many sentry bots are lying dead or half-buried by the entrance facing the Think Tank.
- In the Japanese version where human and ghoul characters' body parts cannot be destroyed, most cases of headless bodies are replaced with gore bags. The dead ghoul prisoner in the Little Yangtze watchtower, however, remains as it is, with its head attached.
Appearances[]
Little Yangtze appears only in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Old World Blues.
Behind the scenes[]
 | The following is based on the Wild Wasteland trait. |
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- Directly south of the western gate is a truck stuck halfway into the side of the ridge with a green puddle underneath it. The front half is on the other side of the ridge. If Wild Wasteland is an active trait, the license plate will read "Rokit 88," which is the same as the rocket truck that Buckaroo Banzai drives in the film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
| End of information based on the Wild Wasteland trait |
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- The names of the two unique ghoul enemies, Numbers 34 and 27, are a reference to the novel The Count of Monte Cristo in which the protagonist, Dantes, is assigned the number 34 and his cellmate is assigned the number 27.
Bugs[]
The dead Yangtze prisoner in the watchtower may disappear.[verified]
In the watchtower, if the head of the dead Yangtze survivor is removed, then the player character leaves the building and returns again, a new head will be spawned.[verified]
Gallery[]
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Z-43 innovative toxins plant terminal entries; terminal, Requisition Order: Chemical Suits
- ↑ The Courier: "I heard you and 8 were attacked by previous visitors."
Dr. 0: "*I don't like to talk about it. 8... he can't talk about it, they fried his voice module something good.* *It wasn't all the visitors, though - only one of them got out of control. He's the one that took control of Little Yangtze, our old human farm.*"
(Doctor 0's dialogue) - ↑ Little Yangtze terminal entries; Little Yangtze log terminal, Log Entry 01
- ↑ Little Yangtze terminals; Little Yangtze log terminal, Elijah's Journal - Day 2
- ↑ The Courier: "Test cities?"
Doctor Borous: "-YES. In the past... individuals would come to us. Pay for technology. And if their town, community, or city was jusssst right...- -We could USE that city as a controlled experiment. Vault-Tec was MUCH better at it, of course, we had to make do. Get permission. Sometimes.- -If only we could have used Commie cities... but capturing whole cities was HARD! So we captured enough Commies to make cities of our OWN!- -So we had a group of Chinese prisoners to experiment on... those were the days... but the true test was SCIENCE on unsuspecting AMERICANS.- -Whether it was holograms, NEW Auto-Docs, toxins, vending machines... we wound them up, let them go into TINY ISOLATED TOWNS. Then... we OBSERVED!-"
(Doctor Borous' dialogue) - ↑ Little Yangtze terminal entries; Little Yangtze log terminal, Log Entry 02
- ↑ Little Yangtze terminal entries; Little Yangtze log terminal, Log Entry 03
- ↑ The Courier: "Tell me what happened."
Dr. 0: "*This human... I can't believe it... he broke out of the Think Tank. In seconds.* *Then he went for Yangtze, got bomb collars, and started practicing on the subjects that were still there until he got the right frequency.* *We were sending robots to stop him and he was slicing and cutting through their shells with some suped-up laser gun like they were cheese... paper.* *When he hacked into the mainframe, 8 tried to stop him and got fried. Me? He rerouted my processors to take control of the train network here.* *If you see the tunnels with the trains plowed into them, you can thank our visitor for that. He wrecked the whole place.* *While we were trying to keep containment on the surface, turns out he used one train to punch out a tunnel and escape... sealed now, but...*"
(Doctor 0's dialogue) - ↑ Little Yangtze terminals; Little Yangtze log terminal, Elijah's journal - Day 4
- ↑ Little Yangtze terminals; Little Yangtze log terminal, Elijah's journal - Day 4 - Addendum
- ↑ Patient log: Y-17
- ↑ Both unique enemies wear the same clothes and even have the same collars as the camp survivors, but only spawn outside of Little Yangtze, implying they managed to escape.