Jakob's Cove
ROLAND: Why is Pandora so damn weird?
MORDECAI: I have no idea man. Shit's loco.
ROLAND: [long winded sigh] Right, okay. Roland's log, Day 30 on Pandora. It's been a while since we opened the Vault, and since then we've mostly been hanging out at Sanctuary, doing a few missions for the people here waiting for our next big job. That job came from Jakobs, of all companies, contacting us asking we head out to their lumber yard in the Jakobs' Cove swamps to deal with an issue that had… risen up.
LILITH: That one was accidental, wasn't it?
ROLAND: Realized it as I was saying it. Anyway, we warped there and were met by, of course, a claptrap, who told us that the town was currently facing a… [sighs] Zombie Apocalypse.
BRICK: Never in my life have I needed something so much and not known until I received it.
LILITH: Now look, I was one of those nerds who made zombie survival plans as a kid, thinking about who I'd save and who I'd leave behind and all that, but even then I knew it wasn't supposed to be real. Why is it real?!
ROLAND: Because this is Pandora. So we made our way to the primary settlement, fighting our way past a few groups of zombies to get there. The zombies are about what you'd expect; slow, brainless, and very weak to headshots.
MORDECAI: It's not even a challenge man. It's just a chore.
BRICK: They blow up good too. Me likey.
ROLAND: The main unique feature is that they spit acid and are immune to corrosive damage, which makes sense since… they're dead. Fire still works though. Once we made it to the town we had to turn on the automated defense turrets, which made the town safe enough to explore. Unfortunately it seems we arrived too late, as I'm pretty sure nobody was still alive there…
LILITH: It sucks, but it's not our fault. It's Jakobs' for not acting faster in getting help.
ROLAND: True enough. The town's claptrap asked us to go talk to Doctor Ned, who is supposedly Doctor Zed's brother, to ask for his help in dealing with the crisis. Ned wasn't in his townhome but off in his research facility deeper in the swamp, so we had to go after him, after doing a quest to gather bird eggs and collect a video log of a local worker to figure out what happened.
LILITH: [sniffling] Poor guy.
BRICK: Hey, no spoilers!
LILITH: Brick, it's a journal.
BRICK: Spoilers, Lilith. Can't be saying spoilers.
LILITH: I… I mean… oh fine, whatever.
ROLAND: On the way to Ned's place we killed a bunch more zombies and hunted down a weird mutant thing that had a pumpkin for a head. I would ask why, but I know I'm not going to get an answer at this point. Also, we, uh… we found an old friend of ours…
LILITH: T.K.'s back!
MORDECAI: How did he even get here? We buried him in Skag Gully ages ago.
LILITH: Maybe Zed missed him and reburied him here and then the zombie stuff happened and brought him back.
BRICK: Ned ain't Zed though.
LILITH: Oh come on Brick, it's so obvious.
ROLAND: Either way, happy as we were to see him, he… is still a zombie and wanted to eat brains. Lucky for us though he was perfectly fine eating zombie brains instead of living brains. So he asked us to collect zombie brains for him. [pause] I now realize that is the strangest sentence I ever said.
BRICK: Give it time, we'll find stranger.
ROLAND: I kinda doubt it. After fighting our way through more zombies we arrived at Ned's research lab, which he built up at the top of a very large tree. We had to defend ourselves from more hordes of undead as he very slowly lowered his elevator down to us.
MORDECAI: I noticed how fast it came down on its own as we were leaving, that shit was totally on purpose!
LILITH: Well I mean yeah, cause we figured out-
ROLAND: Hold up Lilith, want to handle things in order here.
LILITH: Again, it's a journal, why bother?
ROLAND: What can I say, I'm orderly. Anyway, Ned told us he made the zombies 'by accident' and wanted our help to cure them. He had apparently worked on a cure using skag DNA but he'd left the formula at the Generally Hospital and needed us to collect it. The main way to the hospital was blocked by fallen trees, so we had to go through the secret path along the beach hidden by a tombstone of all things.
LILITH: Is it just me or is this place even more morbid than most of Pandora?
MORDECAI: It definitely is. Like, you ever notice the whole time we were here the sun never came up?
ROLAND: We were only there for one night, Mordy.
MORDECAI: Are you sure about that? It felt longer…
ROLAND: While on the way to the hospital we were asked to check on the logs of the person that the Jakobs company had previously hired to handle the zombies, Father O'Callahan. Turns out he'd had as little trouble with the zombies as we've had, but he ran into a monster at the hospital who put up more of a fight. We found that same monster up at the hospital…
LILITH: I feel so bad. He just wanted to work to get money for his family, then all THIS happened. He didn't deserve any of it.
MORDECAI: We all feel bad for Hank, Lils. We all do.
BRICK: I'm keeping the hat to remember him by. Plus it's a cool hat.
ROLAND: Just don't let it get wet. Hank, by the way, was the man whose recorders we collected earlier in the night. In the last one he said he had tested Ned's cure, but it seems the cure wasn't the best, because it actually turned him into a… wereskag. Yes, wereskag. Thankfully he was exceptionally weak to fire, so we burned him down before he could even touch us.
LILITH: Had to be done. Sorry Hank…
BRICK: There, there Lils. [sounds of hugging, bones popping in Lililth's spine]
LILITH: [strained] Thank you Brick...
ROLAND: Anyway, we found the cure sample in a trash bin outside the hospital, because that's sanitary, and were about to head back to town when we got a message asking us to clear out the other wereskags from the beaches around the hospital, because apparently Hank wasn't Ned's only test subject. We went down there and fought several others, including some flocks of rak which had turned into… living skeletons?
MORDECAI: Guess the zombie plague got to them too, in a very strange way.
ROLAND: Either way, the other wereskags were just as vulnerable to cleansing flame and we put them out of their misery. We went back to town, only to find that the townclap who had been helping us was tied up by somebody. That same person had hacked the claptrap with a prerecorded message, telling us to head to Dead Haven to find evidence of the real cause of the plague.
MORDECAI: Never trust a claptrap, guys. Never.
ROLAND: Oh come on, Mordy, most of them are harmless.
MORDECAI: Don't trust them anyway! Right Blood?
[bird caw]
MORDECAI: I am not being paranoid!
ROLAND: We went to Dead Haven by boat from the beach near town, shooting more of the local birds when they tried to peck at us because we're the only safe food they can eat around here.
LILITH: Is that why they were attacking us even though we were shooting at them? Wow… now I feel kinda bad again.
BRICK: They're birds, who cares?
[Indignant squawk]
MORDECAI: Hey!
BRICK: You know what I mean.
ROLAND: When we arrived in Dead Haven it was, surprise, also overrun by zombies. Apparently it was also a Lance outpost of some kind, as we found a few zombified members who could spit out their scorpio turrets… somehow. We made our way through the town, which is disturbingly exactly the same as Old Haven, and found Ned's lab. In the lab we collected some of his echo recordings, which showed that the zombie plague was a whole lot less 'accidental' than he claimed.
MORDECAI: Big freaking surprise there. Man, still can't believe Zed would do this.
BRICK: I'm telling you, Ned ain't Zed Mordy.
MORDECAI: Brick, come on man, the evidence was right there in our faces!
ROLAND: Also it turns out that Ned's assistant, Bill, got killed by the zombies, so Ned tried to resurrect him. It… didn't go as planned.
BRICK: BIG OLD ZOMBIE THING BLOWS UP REAL GOOD, HA HA HA!
LILITH: Why was it able to throw electricity at us?
MORDECAI: I have no idea, who can tell how this stuff works anymore?
ROLAND: Killing the 'Frakenbill' took a while, but eventually we made it dead again. From there we looked for a comm antenna to send the information we found back to Jakobs. Their… [sighs] The quality of their comms tech leaves something to be desired.
MORDECAI: I didn't even know what 56k meant until you told me.
ROLAND: Most people don't know, because it's only a trivia point in the history books. Thankfully they were able to receive the message after only ten minutes of encryption, and they sent us a transport to get us back to town safely. After another ten minutes of waiting and zombie slaying.
LILITH: Hands up, who here hates bureaucracy?
EVERYONE: Me!
ROLAND: After a tinge of nostalgia getting thrown around in a drop-pod we landed back in town with a new mission: deal with Ned. Jakobs was even paying us well to do so, which was a nice bonus given we were planning on killing him anyway.
LILITH: For Hank.
MORDECAI: For the Father.
BRICK: For loot!
ROLAND: Not that we need the money anyway after the Vault payout, but… what's a little more, right? We went into the lumber yard to get to the saw mill, where Ned was hiding, fighting yet more of his zombies along the way.
MORDECAI: So, uh, how many people lived here in Jakobs Cove anyway? Because it feels like we killed a lot more than a few hundred zombies.
LILITH: I think some of them were coming back from the damage we did to them and attacked us multiple times.
BRICK: Not the ones I blew up. They was nothing but little chunks when I got done with them.
ROLAND: On the way to the mill we collected records from other adventurers that Jakobs hired who all died at some point. None of them seemed like they were nearly badass enough to deal with zombies, so I blame their deaths on Jakobs reaching out to people who were clearly not prepared for what they were facing.
LILITH: I second that! One of the guys we found tried to hide in a barrel. Like seriously, who thinks that would keep them safe from zombies?
ROLAND: We fought zombies, wereskags, more zombies, some more zombies, fixed a claptrap-
MORDECAI: I didn't even know that thing was there, man. How did you hear him?
ROLAND: I have a program on my echo looking for claptrap distress signals.
[brief silence]
LILITH: Is that why we found seemingly every claptrap that was damaged on Pandora along our journey?
ROLAND: Yes, yes it is. Finally we entered the sawmill, killed a few more zombies, and found Ned. Ned himself wasn't a challenge… at first.
BRICK: I have seen ugly, my friends. But what he turned into… truly, words cannot express how vile he was.
MORDECAI: He was one ugly motherfucker!
BRICK: That works too.
ROLAND: Once we 'killed' Ned he morphed into this weird mutant thing and went down into a hidden cave filled with blood. His mutant form was a much tougher fight. His hands had massive claw-blades on them, he could dive down into the blood and move incredibly fast, and his only weak point was his face, which kept moving constantly. It took a combination of Lilith's daze bullets, Brick's rockets blowing his arms off, my turret taking out his support zombies, and Mordy taking snapshots at his face that let us take him down.
LILITH: If we'd been any less badass than we are we probably wouldn't have survived.
MORDECAI: But we are, and we did. Suck it Zed, your zombie scheme failed pendejo!
[static of an incoming call]
ZED: Hey there Vault Hunters, how are you guys doing?
MORDECAI: Zed? You're alive?!
ZED: Of course I'm… okay, that's actually a fair question, we are on Pandora after all, but no worries, I'm fine. Fryestone has been nice and quiet after you all took care of the bandits for us. Listen, I was just calling because I wanted to ask you guys a favor. See, I hear that some trouble has started over in Jakobs Cove, where my brother Ned works. Now, I know he can take care of himself, he's plenty smart - and still has his medical license, not that I'm jealous - but I still worry about him, you know? Would you guys mind terribly if you go and check on him for me?
[long silence]
BRICK: Somebody better pick up that echo… because I FUCKING CALLED IT!
ROLAND: I'm signing off now. We have a long conversation ahead of us.