Reviving this old topic with an immortal talking ash pile. It use to be an NCR trooper. Fast travelled to McCarran with a stealthboy still active. Appeared and everyone starts shooting at me. Boone and ED-D kill everyone in nothing flat. I come back a few game days later and the ash piles are still there. One of them looks like it has loot (not empty). I activate it and it speaks. It is still there and doing this many many game play hours later.
I really can't do any Nelson quests as the NCR have wiped it out. I came by while looking for Bootstrap Cavern and the ranger asks me to mercy kill the troopers. I head down there and there are no hostiles. I see a dead CL with a NCR trooper standing over him. Where the captured troopers are crusified are another ten NCR troopers just standing there. There are dead CL and mongrels all over. A mongrel appears and the troopers kill it. I walk up and untie the prisoners. I know there is more to do here, but the CL are dead. The NCR must have come from Camp Forlorn Hope. A long time ago I remember seeing some go from the fort to Nelson, but I couldn't catch up. When I got to where they had been a bunch of CL showed up. I figured the CL had killed them.
Since his upgrade by the Followers, ED-E is a vicious killer. I keep all followers back and passive unless in sewers then they are close. As soon as an enemy detects me, ED-E races past me and kills them. He especially hates other robots. He pretty much wiped out all the bots in a building. He raced past me and around a corner killed two, then into a large room and killed another three. By the time I got there he raced past back the way we'd come, went into a room, up a level and killed every bot on that level. He came back and went back to "nice" mode. I can see why Arcade is nervous about him.