FILE 6:

THE SNYDER FILES FACSIMILES: THOUGHTS ON CITIZENS OF SANCTUARY AND OTHER ASSOCIATES OF THE CRIMSON RAIDERS

NAME: Moxxi Hodunk, AKA Mad Moxxi

AGE: At least in her forties, given that she has two adult children, Scooter and Ellie. That being said, she looks like she's much younger, even without makeup(1). But she's not telling. What's that saying, a true lady never reveals her age or something?

NOTES: Easily one of the most lusted-after women on Pandora, Mad Moxxi is famous for having at least four former husbands (I can name two offhand: Marcus Kincaid and Handsome Jack), lovers of both genders that number in the dozens at least, and a taste for violence that had her, at one point, heading up the Underdome, once Pandora's premium arena for carnage and violence. At least until Jack blew it up. Jack often called her 'Old Balloon Tits', an apt if somewhat derogatory name, given how buxom she is. And yet, to focus on her breasts, her beauty and her bloodthirstiness is to rather miss the true Moxxi that lies beneath.

I first met her when she was married to Jack (which was before he became President, though he had some surprising authority). Even at that age, I was still pining for Angel. Moxxi flirted with me, but when she realised I was holding out for another woman (as well as Jack's intolerance for Moxxi playing around), she toned it down. Still has the sultry seductress thing going, true, but she also adopted a more maternal air about her. Of course, my own mother wouldn't be seen dead in Mad Moxxi's standard outfit, of a sort of fetishized version of the Mad Hatter's outfit (though back when she ran the Underdome, it also had a bit of the Red Queen to it too). But one forgets that she is a mother at least twice over. Not only that, but she fled the Hodunks, a Pandora clan of inbred Southern-style stereotypical rednecks, after they intended to turn her daughter Ellie into a brood mare. All three of them have harboured rancour for the Hodunks ever since, and as of writing, Ellie, with the help of Salvador and Mordecai, has started a gang war between the Hodunks and the Zafords, and probably making Pandora a better place in the process.

Moxxi also has owned a number of less-than-reputable but still popular bars, including the Red Light near T-Bone Junction, the Up Over Bar in Concordia on Elpis, and Moxxxi's at Sanctuary. It was at that last that I met the first friendly face in Sanctuary. Of all the inhabitants of Sanctuary, Moxxi is the closest I have to a confidant. Angel too. The three of us (plus Tim, who I'll get to later) have all experienced what it was liked to get screwed over by Jack, though Moxxi experienced it a little too literally. Not only that, but despite her sexualised appearance and her former ownership of the Underdome, she is actually quite an intelligent and compassionate woman. Many people want to bed her, but I am more content to call her a friend.

NAME: Scooter Hodunk

AGE: Not sure. I'm guessing mid to late 20s.

NOTES: As much as I like Moxxi, I'm not as enamoured with her son, Scooter. Don't get me wrong, the guy's got his heart in the right place for the most part, though he seems a bit too ready to resort to murder at times. He's an absolute genius when it comes to vehicles of all kinds. I'm told all the Hodunks have this, but Scooter in particular is, and I'm quoting Angel here, a savant. His specialty is in cars, but it was also thanks to him that Sanctuary is currently flying. He's also one of the inhabitants of Sanctuary who is willing to overlook the fact that Angel and I worked for Hyperion.

But, well, he's one of those people who (outside of his realm of expertise) is a few stubbies short of a six-pack(2), as my dad used to say. Given his heritage, I'd say a few chromosomes short of a karytotype(3). He's crude, clueless on how interpersonal relationships work, and is murderously protective of his mother and her girly parts (his words, not mine). I heard he put one of her lovers, Lucky Zaford, into a shallow grave. Alive. And to be honest, the way he brays "CATCH-A-RIIIIDE!" from his pre-recorded messages on the Catch-A-Ride stations grates on me. And I heard that more than a few women he had his eye on had either fled Sanctuary, or committed suicide rather than be with him. Not because he is actually malevolent or nasty. But he seems to think that romance would invariably include porn mags. Ugh.

NAME: Doctor Patricia Tannis

AGE: Not sure. Maybe early 30s?

NOTES: Neurotic. Insufferable. Insane. You can use these words and many more like them to describe Patricia Tannis. But she is also a genius. And for all my own intelligence, I am no genius. I'll have to grant Tannis that much, she is a genius. I'm pretty sure that she has multiple doctorates in ridiculously varying areas, including medicine (which pisses off Dr Zed(4)), archaeology, xenobiology, engineering, and physics(5). She is one of those rare scientists who is ridiculously omnidisciplinary. My own doctorate was in Environmental Toxicology (specifically the effects of Eridium on animals in vivo), and while I was young to get a doctorate, I am still nowhere near Tannis' level.

Maybe that's a good thing, all things considered. While I cannot talk much about insanity, being prey to the Sci-Zone, Tannis is insane, or at least extremely neurotic, all the time. She has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, but I know she has a lot more wrong with her than that. To be fair, she went through a lot on Pandora. Brought to the planet by the Dahl Corporation to investigate the Eridian ruins, she began to develop worse neuroses than she ever had before, especially as her colleagues were killed either by bandits, or by the wildlife of Pandora. And judging by what I have learned about the opening of the original Vault, after Dahl pulled her funding and pulled out of Pandora, Atlas stepped in, the Crimson Lance covertly supplying and supporting her. Atlas had, after all, found the very first of the Vaults on Promethea, a cache of weapons and technology. They thought that if someone could find the Vault, it was Tannis.

How willing Tannis was to work with Atlas, I don't know. I know she didn't like their top officer on Pandora, Commandant Steele. In fact, she asked me for the autopsy reports once. But she did conceal her involvement with Atlas from the original Vault Hunters, though she was betrayed by Atlas when they instituted a hostile takeover of the planet, and locked her up after making her send the Vault Hunters on a wild goose chase for another part of the Vault Key. They forgave her, and gave her the then-inert Vault Key for safe-keeping. However, later, Jack and Wilhelm tortured her into giving up the Vault Key. According to her, though, she only gave it up after one of her ceiling chairs was destroyed. I have no idea what she meant by that. She was invited by Roland to join Sanctuary, which she did.

I respect Tannis as being way smarter than I am, and without her Siren powers projector, I would never have saved Angel. All the same, she disturbs me. After that saga with the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve, I returned ECHO logs that detailed Dr Samuels' experiments on human beings to her. She seemed all too enthusiastic to listen to them, and I lost my temper, yelling at her for treating them as if they were things to be savoured for pleasure, and pointing out that Tiny Tina was one of the victims of those experiments, as was (in a roundabout way) my own mentor(6). Tannis had the decency to look a little shame-faced at it, but even so, I am disturbed by her. Still, we work well enough as colleagues, especially where Sirens and Eridium is concerned…

NAME: Doctor Zed.

AGE: Probably 50s or 60s.

NOTES: He doesn't have a medical licence. He has a rather blasé attitude to experimentation in dubious areas (though his brother is apparently even worse). And he's a profiteer in that he heads up a franchise of vending machines that dispense medicine and shields. And yet, this does not detract from the fact that, when push comes to shove, Zed cares about helping people. Well, as long as they're friends or people who can pay.

Zed was living in Fyrestone by the time the first Vault Hunters came across him, and he was the only human inhabitant of the small town at the time (with a Claptrap unit for company, and TK Baha living outside the town's confines). He's pretty tough, though, more than capable of fighting off bandits when necessary. He moved to New Haven temporarily during the whole Atlas fiasco, but moved back to Fyrestone, his birthplace.

Everyone in Sanctuary has at least one reason to be thankful to Zed. I have two. Firstly, he helped patch me up (by proxy) after I was attacked by a mob. And secondly, without the life-support tank and medical injector he modified, I would not have been able to get Angel out of her prison. Dubious he may be, but a good man, for the most part, he is.

NAME: Marcus Kincaid

AGE: Probably 50s or 60s.

NOTES: Moxxi's third husband, and the only ex-husband she is on good terms with. Marcus Kincaid is a cheerfully amoral man with the girth and jolly façade of Santa Claus, the amoral business acumen of Del Boy(7), and the tightfistedness of Ebenezer Scrooge. Although he is mostly known as a weapons dealer with weapons and ammo-dispensing machines all around Pandora and Elpis, he has also worked in other realms. He drove the bus from the spaceport to Fyrestone for the original Vault Hunters, and he enjoys telling stories, albeit with his slant on them.

I'm on good terms with Marcus, partly because I got him a new type of grenade: a shield grenade. A shame it led to the death of its designer, Dave Jones, a friend of mine. Marcus allows me and Angel to use his firing range (for a fee): unlike the other Vault Hunters, we're less adept at using weapons. Of course, don't try getting refunds on a gun: you can sell it back for part of the price, but Marcus' motto is 'No Refunds'.

NAME: Sir Alastair Hammerlock

AGE: Over 40. Not sure how old he is exactly.

NOTES: One of the first good events to come out of my accompanying the Vault Hunters was a chance to meet a man who I greatly respected and looked up to. And unlike many cases of meeting one's heroes, Sir Alastair Hammerlock didn't disappoint. Despite dressing up not unlike those stereotypes of the Great White Hunter, like some Allan Quartermain of Pandora(8), Hammerlock was actually a compassionate and intelligent man. True, he does sometimes ask to have the local population of Bullymongs thinned out, or experiments done on Varkids, but given that the former are mean SOBs, and the latter he took responsibility for, I can forgive him for that.

Originally from the planet Hermes, his older sister Lady Aurelia inherited the family fortune, and apparently strove to make his life miserable. While he enjoys hunting, he combines that with zoology, whereas Aurelia does it purely for the thrill, from what Hammerlock told me. Be that as it may, he spent much of his adult life studying Pandora's wildlife, getting his limbs ripped off by a thresher he dubbed Old Slappy. He is currently a cyborg, though unlike Wilhelm, he isn't a fucking lunatic. Indeed, he's a pretty nice guy, and one of the leading authorities on the zoology of Pandora. Most of what I know about Bullymongs and Skags and Rakks, I learned either from one of his books, or from the man himself.

We first met him at Liar's Berg, where he had become stranded after Flynt's men attacked while he was studying Bullymongs. After we dealt with Captain Flynt and his crew, Hammerlock followed us to Sanctuary. He was also one of those who came to Oasis to help us, and Hammerlock was my best man at both of my weddings (the one interrupted by Jack, and the one that was actually completed). Before the first one, he actually called me a friend. I was touched to be told by a man I respected that he considered me a friend.

Unfortunately, the poor guy has been rather unlucky in love. If he wasn't gay, Gaige (who has a major crush on him, although she is able to rein it in) would probably be on him like a Skag on carrion, even though he's old enough to be her father, if not her grandfather. And his last boyfriend was a brute and an idiot playing at being a zoologist who liked to punch wildlife to death. Good men are hard enough to find on Pandora, and I think poor Hammerlock will be looking for a long time. All the best of luck to him, though.

NAME: Claptrap

AGE: I'd have to look up how old the product line is. He'd probably lie if I asked him.

NOTES: One of Jack's few good deeds was, in my opinion, the destruction of Hyperion's CL4P-TP steward robot line, AKA the Claptraps. Even before the infamous rebellion that occurred five years back, they tended to be obnoxious, loud, egotistical, obsessed with dubstep and dancing, and basically being a Dalek that was merely irritating rather than genocidal. So it was an unpleasant surprise when one found me and the Vault Hunters after the train blew up. He promptly recruited us as his minions to fight Handsome Jack, as revenge for Jack destroying his product line.

After some conversations with Angel and Tim, though, I actually asked Claptrap about part of his past: namely, as a Vault Hunter. I got more of the truth out of Tim than I did out of Claptrap, but even so, Claptrap does have some good achievements to his name. Helping stop Zarpedon destroy Elpis and Pandora does count, even if he was programmed as a Vault Hunter by Jack. And Tim did agree that at times, Claptrap did manage some pretty badass things. And without his help, we wouldn't have been able to get into Control Core Angel. But he's still an egotistical dingus of a robot.

NAME: Tiny Tina

AGE: 13

NOTES: In order to test my character, Lilith sent me to Tundra Express to babysit Tina. If Tina liked me, I passed the test. If I did anything, Tina probably would have killed me, over a prolonged period. Thankfully, the former occurred.

This was in spite of her past. Her family emigrated to Pandora not long before Jack took over Hyperion. When Jack wanted test subjects for Slag experimentation, a bandit called Flesh-Stick, who had helped Tina's parents before, sold them out. But Tina's parents gave her a grenade to make sure she escaped. I know this because I came across ECHO recording by my mentor, Doctor Samuels, who was forced by Jack to do these experiments because her wife was kept hostage. I also believe that Krieg may have been her father, though I don't know for sure. Thankfully, she didn't hold my mentor, or my area of expertise, against me.

I don't know how she and Roland met, only that they did. Roland saved Tina's life more than a few times, but if he is to be believed (and I do believe him), she saved him a whole lot more. Not for nothing that I call her the world's deadliest 13-year old.

Tina is a mixture of contradictions. She adores many childish things, like tea parties, stuffed toys, and chocolate-chip cookies. She also uses language at times that you'd expect from someone twice her age (like pimp or badonkadonk), loves high explosives and bloody violence, and tortured a man to death with electric shocks (admittedly, he was the aforementioned Flesh-Stick, and thus highly deserving of said treatment). When we first met, she was singing her own version of 'Pop Goes the Weasel' as she blew up a Psycho she had tied up. She has violent mood swings. She's seriously fucked up in the head, but you still want to give her a hug anyway.

I think she likes me partly because I share at least one like with her (namely tea, and not Pandoran tea), and partly because she thinks the Sci-Zone is awesome. The fact that I helped get Flesh-Stick for her, and did so in style, only served to cement that fact. Like Gaige, Tina is like a little sister I never had, a bond that only strengthened during our unintended trip to Oasis, where she proved her mettle in battle. She likes Angel, too, despite the fact that Angel is the daughter of Jack, not to mention partly responsible for the New Haven massacre(9). In fact, she seems to want us to be together. She's also bonded with Moxxi and Tim, despite the latter looking like Jack: I guess it's because Tim made a good impression on Tina by parodying Jack mercilessly when they first met. It's like Moxxi and Tim are her new parents.

One last note: she loves Bunkers and Badasses, apparently having been taught the game by Roland. She's very imaginative, though her Game Master skills do need honing. Then again, so do my skills as a player.

NAME: Steve

AGE: Hell if I know

NOTES: I first met this rather cheerful bandit and associate of both the Crimson Raiders and the Zafords when Lilith and Tannis were testing Tannis' device. His sole vocabulary seemed to consist of the word 'Heyo!', with varying volume and cadence. He was also a friend of Claptrap's. I honestly don't know much more, other than that he worked as an enforcer for the Zafords.

He was also one of those sent to Oasis to help us. And it cost him his life. Annoying as he was, he was much better than Claptrap. And he didn't deserve to die the way he did.

FILE 6 ANNOTATIONS:

I'm pretty sure I got everyone who was in Sanctuary. If you're wondering why Tim or Angel weren't present, they'll be in the next chapter, about Hyperion employees and the like. Incidentally, this is the longest chapter yet in my fanfics. :P

1. I was amazed at how great Moxxi looks without makeup in the Pre-Sequel. I'd frankly prefer her like that. As for how Snyder knows, I think Snyder (and Angel) did the same thing as the Vault Hunters in the Pre-Sequel: stumbled upon her in her down-time (before she left with Tim to investigate the Badass Crater of Badassitude for Tannis, anyway). Unlike the other Vault Hunters, Moxxi is more comfortable being out of character around them, so while she would ask them to be quiet, she doesn't use the threat of a shallow grave.

2. An Aussie idiom. A stubby is a name for a beer bottle. The equivalent can be 'a few sandwiches short of a picnic'.

3. I used this metaphor back in Hooked on a Feeling. A karyotype is the full set of chromosomes in a cell. Angel even says in the game that he's short a few chromosomes.

4. This is discussed in the game. Zed seems a bit bitter that Tannis has a medical degree, though his wording suggests that Tannis lords it over him.

5. I chose these disciplines to show how Tannis is capable of working on Eridian ruins, having all but created the ECHO network (on Pandora, at least), and so on.

6. I wanted to do this in Hooked on a Feeling, but didn't get a chance to write in the relevant scene. Her cavalier attitude to these ECHOs in-game pissed me off. Snyder, outside the Sci-Zone, would agree.

7. Del Boy being the character played famously by David Jason in Only Fools and Horses, a long-running BBC comedy series. Until A Touch of Frost, it was easily his most famous role.

8. Allan Quartermain may be best known to modern readers from Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the movie adaptation, but he was a well-established literary character created by H Rider Haggard for King Solomon's Mines, as well as later books.

9. In contrast to her attitude in the game. I know Roland died in Control Core Angel, but I think Tina was more than a little bitchy in turning Angel into a drider and a villain. I don't care how much of a child she was, or how much denial she was drowning in regarding Roland's death. Here, Tina at least knows that Angel was coerced, and given that she likes Snyder, she likes Angel.