A breath of fresh air

Finished the DLC today, and it's good that I was at a high level since I needed every skill I had.

I first had to track down the mute, who was mistaken for the star of the opening of the casino and taken to the top hotel room, and she had a voice again. The reason for this mistaken identity I found out later was because the ghoul was the one who trapped the mute in the auto-doc and had her voice box altered to sound identical to the starlet since her voice opens the casino vault. Then I had to track down the ghoul who was trapped in the theater where he was supposed to perform opening night. In order to disable the holographic security of the place I had to find several keys and recordings, but first I had to pass a series of high level science conversation checks to prevent me and the ghoul from getting killed. After that I found the nightkin in the kitchen and was about to blow the whole place up with a gas leak. Thanks to some high level speech conversation checks I was able to merge both parts of his personality together.

With everyone safe I went back up stairs to have the former mute open the door to the vault, but first I had to convince her with a speech cheek not to try and kill the guy who put us through all this. The vault it's self was a huge maze with every manner of hazard (except the ghost people) and was a pain to navigate, but in the end I got to the main safe. Then with more science skill checks I tricked the mastermind of the operation to come down himself and locked him down in the vault. After that it was only a matter of walking out of the front gate and back to New Vegas.

In a nice segue, the last bit of the DLC is a message from the mastermind of the operation to his former student, who was not only the former girlfriend of the mute but also one of the possible companions. So I started right up on my quest to get all the companions starting with her, who turns out to be a brotherhood of steel scribe that excels in unarmed combat. Her upbeat and joking personality is a very nice change to the normal gloom of the wasteland, sort of like Moira Brown from Fallout 3 but not so fatally optimistic. To unlock her personal quest I had to travel to several locations, but with all the map uncovered it took a few seconds, now I have to go to the Brotherhood of Steel base for the first time not intending to blow it up.