@matana @rasterman @ChristiJunior

Seriously: What the heck was up with "Kid in a Fridge?"

I recently came across Billy on a new character. I chose a couple of dialogue options I hadn't done in the past to complete this particular quest...but in having chosen each different outcome on different characters, I now realize why this quest made me feel so...empty. No satisfaction at the end, no real sense of completion.

Gonna hop on my soapbox really quick and kind of outline my main concerns with this kid.

Nobody heard Billy screaming for help in 200 fucking years? He's MAYBE ten or twenty minutes away from Quincy, his hometown. Why and how has nobody heard him in that fridge in 200 years? You could argue that caravans don't come through there a lot nowadays, but....this is 200 years we're talking, not just a few years. Did no one walking in and out of Quincy hear this child making a racket? Did not one curious person go ahead and just open the fridge?

Billy should not be able to see. A geologist named Siffre decided to pretty much live underground for two months. Upon pulling him out, he had to wear a blindfold to protect his eyes from the sunlight. Siffre had to do this after two months - Billy should be completely fucked in terms of proper vision. I can't say whether or not he'd be completely blind forever, but at the very least, he'd need a thick pair of sunglasses for a pretty long time.

Billy's reaction to getting sold into slavery is...annoyed? "You sold me? You asshole!" isn't really the response I would expect from a kid who hasn't seen the light of day in 200 years, let alone other people. I would expect something more hurt, afraid, and confused. Could be that he's heard of slavers and slavery as they pass by, but that brings me to my first point - nobody heard him in there for 200 years, apparently. Either way, he would have no reason to know beforehand that slavery is now "legal" again.

How is Billy just so...okay with things? I linked an article above relating to what isolation does to the mind, but the people who tested it didn't do it for more than a few months to a year or two. This is an 11-13 year old kid who's been trapped in a tiny fridge for 200 years. How is he even able to walk, let alone still think like a child? I imagine he'd be losing his mind and have lost the ability to form coherent speech, if he didn't go feral from being a ghoul. He shouldn't be acting all ungrateful and kid-like after the SS saves him and his parents ("Waah, all my friends are dead, this sucks"). He'd be fucking shell shocked.

In fact, why ISN'T Billy feral? I'm nowhere near an expert on ghouls, but the info I know from all three games (and a bit from the first two) basically introduces three factors for how a ghoul might go feral - their genetics, their mental state, and how many rads they took. (Maybe Krevhbeknih shit. But we'll leave that out for now.) Billy....was completely alone, in the dark, in a fridge that barely left him room to move, for 200 fucking years. He should almost definitely be feral. Or, referencing the point above this one, a gibbering mess of a child.

So those are the gripes I had about this quest. It just feels so....lazy. This kid could have been one of the most interesting characters or companions in the game, but they treat the whole thing like he's been in the fridge for 30 minutes rather than 200 years. It's somewhat infuriating how lazy they were in designing this one.