It's been a few years since I last played New Vegas. I aim to rectify that.

I'm presently re-installing the game and plan on doing a full play through, complete with journal entries of my experiences. This will be a purely vanilla run - no mods what-so-ever, as well as on hardcoe mode.

The boots of the Courier walk the highways of the Mojave once more. Who he was before, not even he knows. Who he will become...that we shall discover together.

Don't drink the NCR propaganda!

I hear the Mojave's nice this time a year.

I left Victor's shack and spent my morning with another settler shooting up a rad scorpion that went psycho and attacked the bighorners on my door step, just another weekend in Vegas.

"...Truth is kid, the game was rigged from the start."

The lightning flashed and the thunder rolled.

The Courier jolted awake in his cot, gasping as the nightmare overtook him once more. With a shaking hand he pressed it against his sweat streaked face, panting heavily. In another room, Doc Mitchell continued to snore, oblivious.

It had been a week, and while Doc Mitchell did good work when it came to fixing the physical problems, it was the mental ones the Courier was having the hardest time coping with. The nightmares were only the tip of the proverbial iceberg (Whatever an 'iceberg' was...) in that respect. The Courier got out of his cot and walked over to a mirror. He looked into his face, with the narrow cheek bones, long golden hair, and the pronounced epicanthic fold to his eyes...and saw only a stranger. There was no emotional connection, no memories to overburden him...he was for all intents and purposes a blank slate.

The lack of memory bothered him in his waking hours as much as the nightmares did in his sleep. Who was he? How did he get here? Was he always a Courier? How did he have fundamental knowledge of language, arithmetic, and the world around him yet his own personal history be wiped away in the muzzle flash of a gun?

Was he a good man? He didn't know. The shotgun he'd been found with looked well worn, but in the Mojave that could be simple prudence then declaration of intent. The locals of Goodsprings had been kind to him, though he was still on the fence about what to do with Ringo. He'd ventured to the site of the attack at night, and saw that the Powder Gangers didn't even have the decency to bury the bodies. He wasn't sure what he thought of the Powder Gangers either, really. On one hand, they were criminals. On the other hand, criminal or not, they were being used as pressed - and highly expendable - labor. The dynamite they wielded as a calling card was just as deadly to them as anyone.

He glanced down at the delivery order - the only clue he had as to who he'd been before. But he'd been to Primm - or at least the outskirts of it. The NCR occupation surrounded the primary approach to the town and all other approaches were booby trapped. He had to get in there if he was going to even consider solving the mystery of who he was...let alone the more pressing mystery of who had shot him and why.

But that was the crux of it, wasn't it? To do that, he'd have to potentially turn violent. He had no qualms about putting down the various critters roaming the land - indeed, he discovered he was something of a natural around a camp fire - but other people?

Was that who he was?

Was he a violent man, or a gentle one? And if he started killing folk, would he be blighting the legacy of the man he'd been before? Or starting down the same road of destruction he was on before the strike from Mjolinir gave him a second chance?

The Courier paused in his ruminations. Mjolinir. The hammer of the Norse god of Thunder, Thor. How did he know that? For that matter, why was that obscure a fact tucked away in his head?

He gazed into the mirror once more.

Who was he?