He was annoying, but I gave him some combat armour, a chinese assault rifle and about five hundred rounds, and guess what... he's actually a bit of a badass. :gun:

Plus, I gave a thought to what a difficult childhood he likely had growing up in Lamplight where he was eight years older than every other kid there. It was clear none of them liked him.

I would get half way to big town before I shot him in the face, may he burn in the lowest depths of hell.

QUOTE: Plus, I gave a thought to what a difficult childhood he likely had growing up in Lamplight where he was eight years older than every other kid there. It was clear none of them liked him.

Actually, the canonical ages of the Lamplight characters are:
Sticky: 16, most likely.
Joseph: 15
Knick-nack/Knock-knock: 14
Eclair: 13
Macready: 12
Squirrel: 12
Penny: 12
Lucy: 11
Sammy: 10
Zip: 9
Biwwy: 9
Bryan: 8
Bumble: 6

And it wasn't so much that they didn't like him than that they were just chucking him out because he was 16, and those were the rules. Kind of like the end of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery". Nothing personal, Sticky, just the way it is.

I believe they send children from Big Town through to Little Lamplight to keep the chain going.

That was my first guess, until I saw Big Town, and realized it was essentially an all-you-can-eat buffet for super mutants. No one there survives long enough to reproduce. Hard to believe anyone's dumb enough to stay there.

In my upcoming fic, "Lamplighter's Fate" (first chaopter should be up by tomorrow), the strange relationship between Lamplight and Big Town gets fleshed out a little. And if that's not cause enough to make you want to read it, something really horrible happens to Sticky.

Sticky....*snort.

I armed him to the teeth, gave him grade A weaponry, guided (meaning kept him alive) through the wastes....only to have him be one of the only two survivors in Bigtown....little **** skulked in a house while a series of albino radscorpions spawned in the main street and wiped them out.

I limited my trips to Litlle Lamplight to the bare necessities...trying to catch up to the kids to talk to them while they scuttled and skulked around in the dark was the most frustrating part of this game for me. Seriously, if I could have I would have wiped them out, even if my character was a do-gooding saint. There's a .44 with macready's name on it in my pocket....If he ever hit 16, he'd never see 17.

Story's up, and my siggy links to it. And if you don't like Macready, you should definitely read it.

As for Sticky, he would almost have to have grown up either in Rivet City or Lamplight. He'd have been chucked out of Tenpenny for sheer annoyingness, blown away by Jericho had he lived in Megaton (no one would have cared), and picked off by a raider or super mutie anywhere else. Someone as hapless as he could only survive in a well-protected environment