Chapter 541 - Just Needs A Keye

With that, the group split off to do various things. Dean, left to look around in areas he had exclusive access to due to his status as a singer. Though, Afton was cautious about giving the ghoul too much independence, he'd shown that he was more than willing to 'crack a few eggs' to make an omelette. Still, if he was ever worried about what the ghoul was up to he could always contact him via his collar... If he didn't answer it meant that he'd either betrayed them, gotten knocked unconscious, or been captured by Elijah.

Veronica wanted to stay in the lobby to take care of Anja and Christine, even if the latter wanted to be active in hunting Elijah. In the end she'd actually pulled Afton to the side and almost begged him to persuade Christine to stay behind and not do anything dangerous.​​

Yeah, that surprised him... Fortunately, he'd ended up stumbling across something that could be useful... Apparently, there was an upper limit on the amount of cash you win in the Casino... Once you hit the limit, you'd be stopped from playing and granted a VIP position, this might allow them to gain access to some of the more secure areas without having to fight through hundreds of Holograms and Auto-Turrets.

With that, he'd left the trio at a Blackjack table as they attempted to reach the VIP status. Afton wasn't sure if they'd manage it, as all of them had pretty terrible luck, but maybe they could overcome it with skill? Veronica could probably count cards? Christine probably could have before her injury... Now however he was unsure if she was even able to count.

Obviously, Anja would be less than useless at this sort of task... The first problem was that she was blind, the second is that she'd never seriously gambled...

That left Afton, who was currently clambering through maintenance tunnels with an annoyed look. He'd crawled down here to see if there was some kind of secret bunker that produced the Cloud, but was thoroughly annoyed when he spotted the thick red mist lingering partway through.

He could see the fans nearby, but none were working, meaning that the ventilation system was malfunctioning, which led to this obstacle. He sighs to himself, first things first is fixing the ventilation then... Though, how he was going to locate it in this monolithic casino was another matter entirely.

Like this, three days pass with almost no progress whatsoever... The Sierra Madre Casino was simply so huge that navigating through it took hours alone, let alone trying to map out and figure out what is where. It wasn't like there was a map of the place lying around, so the group had to do things via trial and error...

During this time Afton had found a few things of interest. Aside from the dorms which the group liberally use to rest in, he'd found a number of security rooms that controlled specific parts of the Casino's Holograms and Turrets. The only bad thing about them was the fact that they weren't the main security hub, meaning anything in the room could be overridden if Elijah found it.

Still, using his newly gained authority over local Holograms, he started investigating the more restricted sections. These places, in particular, seemed to be more damaged and ruined than the rest of the Casino... The reason for this? This was where the VIP rooms were, and these rooms had large balconies that looked over the Sierra Madre mountain range.

Obviously, the Cloud had come in through the doors left open by their former residents, making this place far more dangerous than the rest of the Casino. Walls were chipped, cracked, and fragile, the floor had large holes in it leading to god knows where, and the overall structural stability was suspect.

Afton was very nervous about walking through it while wearing his Power armour. He weighed over half a ton with it on, and he was quite sure the floor was barely rated for that weight even before everything went to shit.

Searching through the rooms, he didn't find much aside from a few malfunctioning Holograms. He had to put them out of commission by destroying their emitters, but other than that it was uneventful... The Cloud had peculiar effects on technology he'd found, while it corroded and destroyed most of it, sometimes it seemed to only target specific components, which didn't really make sense due to what he'd seen of it.

He had found something interesting though... A room affectionately labelled 'Vera Keyes', he'd asked Dean about that name a while ago, but all he'd said was that she was like him, a singer invited by Sinclaire. to perform.

Strangely, once he entered he found a number of seemingly random things... Vera Keyes skeleton was lying in a chair in the corner of the room, still wearing her trademark starlet dress. In the next room he'd found an Auto-Doc?

Afton scans through the prerecorded data that'd been collected two hundred years ago and realises that this was Vera Keyes personal Auto-Doc... It held almost all the information about her body, from her DNA, to her eye colour, to her hip shape.

Vera Keyes, it seems, was terminally ill. And had had this Auto-Doc secreted to her room so nobody would know about it... Judging by the many used dosages of Med X next to her corpse, she was using Chems to stifle the pain.

Quite depressing to say the least... "*Bzztch* Dean, I found your friend, Vera." he states into the radio while waiting for a response.

"Oh? How did you manage that?" the ghoul curiously asks via his collar.

"I located her room and found her dead in the corner... Did you know she was terminally ill?" he abruptly asks, quickly silencing Dean.

Dean stills at this, memories flashing in his mind while dots were quickly connecting... No, he hadn't known that, but it did explain many of her choices in the end... Choices that could've led to the deaths of both of them. Well, that did to one of them.