Fallout: New Vegas: Haunted Hotel

This is not only my first wiki page, but also my first creepypasta. Please feel free to offer input on how to better present it, or just alter the format yourself. Just please do not alter the story itself.

Foreword
Throughout a playthrough of New Vegas, how many times does the player happen upon the skeleton of some long-dead human, possibly a victim of the nuclear holocaust that destroyed America or some poor scavenger who got in over their head? We pass these remains without a second thought, but if we look closely, we can glean some very interesting and in some cases disturbing stories behind these deaths. I'm not talking about seeing an old skeleton in a den full of Nightstalkers or lying in a pool of waste. In my travels, I've stumbled across a couple of strange occurrances. The environment around some of these stray skeletons begged investigation. I don't claim to know if these are one-hundred percent accurate, but these skeletons seemed to tell me stories. As I explore New Vegas for the umpteenth time, I will add more. The narrator describing these events is my Courier, Ivan. (Screenshots to come shortly)

Haunted Hotel
 Primm as a town is a rather unassuming place with unassuming people. The only real noticeable inhabitants are the cowardly Deputy Beagle, Johnson Nash the local Mojave Express supervisor, his wife Ruby who makes casserole with radscorpion venom, and Primm Slim who runs the Vikki and Vance Casino. There's something else there, something slightly off, though. Well, some -things-. I found them when I was purging the town of the escaped convicts from the NCRCF. The scum dropped like flies as my fire axe cleaved through them, sending limbs and sprays of blood as I carved on through their numbers hiding in the Bison Steve Hotel. "Horrifying" would be the word used to describe the way I dispatched them, but it's not my fault that I go into a killing frenzy every time I hear a gun, whether the shot or some indication of it being drawn, brandished, or cocked. People think I'm crazy for this and the fact that I rip apart anything that sports a checkered pattern. You try being shot in the head by some chicken-fucker in a checkered suit and not showing some... symptoms. Anyway, I digress.

 After the 'red mist' had lifted, I had to make my way back through the place because I don't loot in the middle of a fight and I wanted the caps. Going room to room, I was intrigued by the number of salvageable items lying around. 'Why the HELL did no one pick up all these old guns, caps, and little valuables? Why were the locks on these containers intact when by all accounts this town had been inhabited for years? Why didn't the citizens use this place to gather and hold meetings? Or even use some of the less-damaged rooms as housing or at the very least a private spot to go off for a good fuck?'

 As I approached one room on one of the upper floors, I think one of the answers came to me. Opening the door, the wall separating the room I was in from its neighbor had collapsed. A barren bed without a mattress sat right in front of me with a locked gun cabinet next to it. The usual decay had set in on everything, the nearby bathroom holding an unopened first-aid box. There was a desk with a long-overturned lamp sitting atop it. Lying in front of the desk, however, was a skeleton, the cadaver sprawled out beside an overturned chair. Now, normally when I find skeletons, they're in pieces but this one seemed to hold together pretty well. Bones were still in sockets and all that. It was odd, but I was used to seeing the decrepit remains of people in ruins like these. A wastelander's got no business shedding tears for the dead when everything around them yearns to murder them, you know? But this room was a bit cold and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I felt watched, but I passed the body and scavenged what I could, dismissing it as nothing. On my way out, though, my attention shifted to something shiny. In front of the body was a holodisk, which I snagged and was about to load into my Pip-Boy to give it a read.

 Upon touching it, however, I was assaulted by a vision of some kind. Everything blurred in front of me as what could only be the man whose body was now on the desk leaned forward, sobbing. Another man opened the door, entering. “I see you brought the money, Mr. Petersen,” said the stranger. “Yes, half a million dollars, just as you asked. It's all I have” The man held out a briefcase. “I didn't involve the cops at all.”

 “Good, good.” Said the man, “I'll send her in. Just put your head down on the desk and count to ten.” Clearly skeptical, but not about to disobey this man that had an obvious hold over him, the man laid his head on the desk. With a single motion, the man with the case pinned his target's head to the desk and buried a knife between the vertebrae. Classic assassination move, sever the spinal chord and you paralyze them while they bleed out. A cruel move, but effective. As the man bled out, he could do nothing but slump to the side and thud against the floor while his killer yanked out the knife and casually left.

 Things returned to normal and even I shuddered. I'd never believed in this kind of stuff before and I wrote it off as a side-effect of the psycho I had to take to give me a boost when I cleaved these two guys in half with one swing. Not a normal side-effect, but strange shit happens with two-hundred-year-old chems, you know? Not a bad trade-off, really. I got to see some kinda hallucination and got a story to tell about chopping through two guys from it. I don't normally take psycho, I'm not a druggie. Sarsaparilla's my vice. Anyway, plugging in the disk, a message came up on my Pip-Boy.

 “ Mr. Petersen,

If you want to see your wife alive again, bring the cash in small unmarked bills to the Bison Steve on Tuesday.”

 'Poor sap,' I thought to myself. Must have been a lot of hate between those two to warrant this kind of kill. Take his wife, his money and his life. 'You never give a kidnapper what they want,' I thought. 'You lure them in and you END them.' Some unseen... presence?... seemed to agree. No idea how I could tell since there was nothing there, but it felt like something was nodding approval. Approval of WHAT, I have no clue.

 Anyway, I spared no tears and paid no mind, heading back into the hall to resume systematically looting everything that wasn't nailed down. The chill went away, seemingly confined to that room. I paid it no mind and finally hit a locked door, which I picked immediately. Inside was a strange scene. A queen-sized bed was right in front of the door, a desk to the right. On the desk was a distinctly familiar briefcase... Mr. Petersen's. I didn't remember his name out of sentiment, it was just a weird name, alright? Anyway, the room was ransacked, like there'd been a fight or something. Looked like this was the room where the assailant had been keeping the sap's wife. The familiar chill came back with that usual tingle that set me -a little!- on edge. Seeing as how they'd clearly not made it out of the hotel, the money had to still be in it. Old World currency's still worth caps, so I tried to open it.

 Soon as my hand touched the damned thing, another vision hit me with a slight wave of nausea. Same as before, everything went blurry and blurred figures formed. Could barely make them out, but the woman and the killer sounded much younger than Petersen.

 “ I got the cash and the old man's dead. Now I can take off for Reno and start over. You can get the inheritance and come on down after I've got our little place bought and set up.” He spoke as he entered the room. The woman had been lying down on the bed and got up to share what must have been a hell of a kiss with the way they lingered and moaned. Fucking... She'd been in on it the whole time. “Yeah, baby... Let's... celebrate.” She spoke languidly, the accentuation and inflection taking the age-old pattern of seduction.

 They climbed into bed with him on top of her. “I can see big things in our future, babe. You and me, we're gonna live in the lap of luxury.” “Yeah... Big things in our future...” She smirked, “Thing is...” Her knee shot up and caught whoever-the-fuck-he-is right in the crotch, then buried a knife in his gut, twisting it and attempting to do as much damage as possible with the way her wrist and hand were shaking and shifting. More you move a blade while it's in someone, the more damage it does to the insides. “There's much more room for those big things with just one of us... Thanks for the help, sugar, but I can handle it from here.”

 And holy FUCK did that piss off her ex-lover because even as he bled out, he pinned her to the bed, grabbing her by the throat and strangling her even as she tried to kick him in the crotch again. The knife shot out and sunk in his groin, getting a groan out of even me. The guy was undeterred, though. Adrenaline must have been going for him to not drop like a rock from that. With a sickening pop, he snapped her neck and immediately tried to get to the door for help. But when he tried to open it, it wouldn't budge. Oh, the handle could turn but the damned door wouldn't move an inch. He was trapped. At that time, I felt that presence from the other room in this vision, tainted with malice but still invisible. Panicked, the twice-murderer made for the bathroom and I guess he was a hardcore partier because... Not a single stimpak but plenty of psycho and med-X. He climbed into the tub and frantically tried to shoot up with whatever he could, probably in some kind of misguided attempt to keep from bleeding out but it could have just been trying to dull the pain of his passing. Either way, the needles wouldn't even pierce his skin. It was like that presence was keeping him from finding any relief. He died in that tub, as was evidenced by the fact his skeleton sat in that very tub when the vision cleared, med-X and psycho lying all around him and the woman's skeleton lying on the bed still. I felt three presences now, two in some kind of pain, maybe, and the third getting some sweet satisfaction? No idea, just trying to make sense of the sensations -I- was getting. Not that those sensations stopped me from taking every piece of salvage, including those chems, and moseying right on back out of there to resume looting those corpses. What can I say? Facing death in the wasteland tends to harden you against incorporeal threats. Or it kills you. And they didn't need it anymore.



 After telling this story to a couple of people, I ran into someone who told me that what I was experiencing was some kind of psychic phenomenon, but I don't buy into that Old World bullshit about mediums and crystals and hexes. That wasn't the only time I ever felt presences like that, but I can tell you it never happened before getting shot in the head and it's never affected me past fucking with my perceptions so it's not like whatever this is, whether it's ghosts or just hallucinations or whatever, bother me. Might be because I don't fuck with them past what I have to do in order to gather some caps.