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This is a themed playthrough based on The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. The names of Roland and Jake are taken directly from the characters by which they were inspired. Their path and bond will resemble that found in King’s story, but will be adapted to the context of New Vegas. The way Jake came to be in Roland’s path will be revealed, Roland will settle scores with many adversaries, and both will leave a permanent mark on both the Mojave and each other.

ROLAND

Roland was the embodiment of duty—the kind of rugged soul that would ride a “death before dishonor” declaration to his grave with unflinching integrity. He had been well served over the years by the advantages of strength and cunning combined with rigorous survival and combat training during his adolescence. However, no matter how many battles he won or enemies he conquered, Roland knew time was the villain he would never best. As it had every soldier before him, time left Roland always staring down the barrel of his eventual obsolescence. 

As he knelt before the man in the checkered coat, the shame of his capture weighed more heavily on him than the proximity of death. “Is this it?” Roland asked himself. Though he did not mean to ask if this was the moment of his death. Rather, he wondered if it was the moment that time finally caught him. 

He blamed the Khans. If not for them, things would have been different. As an NCR ranger who remembered all too well the tragedy at Bitter Springs, Roland could not suffer himself to be responsible for the deaths of yet more Khans. The bitter cocktail of hesitation, remorse, and uncertainty he swallowed upon encountering them and the low-level gangster with whom they traveled had nevertheless brought him to his current moment. Complete helplessness; bound and kneeling before an arrogant, serpentine Strip thug. 

The irony of his situation did not escape Roland. He had served as an NCR ranger taunting and narrowly avoiding death for decades. Since his unceremonious departure from the rangers, he had often worked as a caravan guard and bounty hunter. When the caps were right, he would also take on courier jobs. And therein lay the irony—the job Roland worked the least and that generally posed the least risk would be the job that did him in. 

And what of his time in the rangers? Had his decision to leave been the moral high road he sought, or had it been a calculated error? Certainly his relationship with Hanlon had soured in an unimaginable way. It all went back to Rattletail and Roland’s disagreement with Hanlon’s methods. He saw before perhaps anyone else that Hanlon compensated for a lack of warfare competence with campaigns of disinformation and deceit. Roland believed adamantly that Boulder City could have been saved had Hanlon chosen to defend the Dam differently. The Legion could have been not only defeated, but disheartened and deterred as well. 

Yes, the NCR had beaten the Legion, and Hanlon was hailed a hero. Yet Roland puzzled that so few saw how Hanlon’s winning strategy of sacrificing an entire settlement fueled the Legion’s confidence. The NCR had only won through desperation—a “fool me once” scenario that would not work again and that made them appear vulnerable even in victory. 

Being a man that inspired loyalty, Roland’s possession of these thoughts made him a liability in Hanlon’s eyes. Never mind that the two had decades of history together. President Kimball and General Oliver were enough for Hanlon to worry about; he didn’t want a younger, stronger ranger not afraid to still join his men on the front lines waiting in the wings to take his place. Thus Hanlon began sending Roland and those closest to him on assignments bordering on suicide-mission level danger. 

This led Roland to his dilemma. Should he boldly speak out against a man hailed as an NCR hero thus sowing the Republic with distrust and fear? Or should he simply acquiesce? After all, his individual contributions to the NCR were not worth the instability he threatened to bring if his budding rivalry with Hanlon continued to grow. 

His departure from the rangers thus seemed a necessary thing. Surely he could not be so arrogant as to believe the NCR wouldn’t survive without him. To the contrary, with Roland out of the way, Hanlon would have no further reason to expose those who admired Roland to increased risk. 

After leaving the rangers, life as a caravan guard and bounty hunter was all too easy for Roland. He wondered if the simplicity of his current life relative to that of a ranger would dull his instincts. If his capture by the Khans was any indication, Roland’s fears were almost certainly warranted. 

As Roland knelt, the man in plaid waved a gun and said words meant to be clever. As he spoke, Roland rotated his wrists and felt the ropes burning his skin. The man standing over him was smug, but Roland could also see he was a coward. After all, over the years Roland had known men who could elicit fear. None of them, he reflected, would have found it worthwhile to provoke someone incapable of response nor attempt to impress cohorts with senseless banter when actions would suffice. “His day will come sooner than he thinks,” Roland mused to himself as the shiny gun pointed his direction. 

Roland never heard the gunshot despite it carrying over a large distance. His seemingly lifeless body was thrown into a shallow grave atop the hill just outside Goodsprings. Nevertheless, this was not the end of Roland. With the help of a few unexpected allies, Roland was revived and put on his path to vengeance--and so it began. The man in plaid fled across the desert, and the old ranger followed.

JAKE

The boy was alone and frightened when Roland found him. The desperation of Jake’s condition was deeper than most could have seen at first glance, but Roland had learned to read the look on a man’s face long ago. Having seen hopelessness and consuming void in the eyes of men at death’s door more times than he could count, he knew the terror in Jake’s eyes was something similar to the fear of death, but something different at the same time. 

“This kid isn’t scared of dying,” Roland thought. “He’s scared of living.” 

To be certain, the fear and confusion Jake was experiencing when Roland encountered him was the darkest he had felt in his life. Before waking up outside Goodsprings Source, the last memories Jake had were from a world distantly removed in both time and location. Jake didn’t even recognize his own body. If asked, Jake would have said he was ten years old. Isn’t that what every boy would say who hasn’t had an eleventh birthday? However, the person he saw in the broken, dirty glass scattered in the Mojave desert was older by at least five years. “This might be what my older brother would look like,” Jake thought, ”if I had a brother.”

Frightening as it was, this evidence of the passage of time was Jake’s reassurance that he wasn’t actually in hell. He had died, after all. He remembered that well. The searing heat combined with the feral ghouls from which he had fled corresponded roughly to the flames and demons about which he had heard the preachers warn during his childhood in New York City. As much as he’d hated spending one of his two weekend mornings in church instead of at home watching cartoons, Jake’s mind went to the crackers and grape juice he’d been served in those peculiar church ceremonies. In his starved and dehydrated state, even the body and blood of Jesus sounded appetizing. 

“Is this what the dead do?” Jake wondered. “Live in fear of the afterlife?”

On the one hand, Jake did not fear death. He was already dead. On the other, he strongly felt his sense of self-preservation and fear compelling him to certain behaviors. “Fight or flight” he’d heard the instinct called in his fifth grade science class. Without a weapon or the skill to use one, Jake had resorted exclusively to flight.

By the time he found his way to Nevada Highway Patrol Station, Jake believed he’d seen it all. Geckos, bloatflies, ghouls, criminals, radscorpions, and troopers with guns. Jake surely wasn’t meant for this world and he wouldn’t survive it. Locking himself in the utility closet of the station seemed an act of cowardice and caused Jake to feel a small sting of shame, but no option seemed a sufficient alternative.

Jake believed he would die in that closet--starved or found by whatever demon sniffed him out first. As fate would have it, that demon’s name was Roland.