Frank Horrigan of the Secret Service

Context

Frank Horrigan is the Final Boss™ in the 1998 classic video game Fallout 2. For more context about the Fallout setting, see our sample Vault Dweller character profile. For more about the Fallout 2 events, see our sample Chosen One character profile.

Horrigan’s profile also includes basic data about the Enclave and the President. This data is based on Fallout 2, without a strong effort to bring in data from later Fallout games.

• This profile mentions a specific video game playthrough. See our video games writeups FAQ for more.
• This profile features tabletop RPG mechanics about the video game’s gameplay. See our video games writeups FAQ for more.
• This profile features non-canon hypotheses about in-game events and mechanics. See our video games writeups FAQ for more.

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Background

Powers & Abilities

Frank Horrigan is an elite Enclave trooper. He’s proficient with power armour  operation, close and ranged combat, advanced weaponry and various US military infantry skills.

He may also have received training in security. Though he is a Secret Service member — possibly the only active one — it is unclear whether he was trained as a bodyguard. Our game stats assume that he was, but it’s a stab in the dark.

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Forced evolution

Some years before the Fallout 2 events, Horrigan was accidentally exposed to the Forced Evolution Virus. This impossible mutagenic compound is what is behind the bulk of the monsters and mutants in the Fallout setting.

Specifically, Horrigan was exposed to the fumes of the FEV vats used by the Master to create super-mutants. For more about those partially failed super-soldiers, see our super-mutants species profile.

Though Horrigan was turned into a deformed giant, he was in many ways a great success for the super-mutants program. A lot of this probably stems from Enclave doctors controlling the damage whilst allowing the enhancements to take place. Horrigan also had the huge advantage of having undamaged human DNA, which is what the mutagen had been calibrated for.

As a result, Horrigan is close to 12 feet and two tons, with superhuman strength, durability and aggression. He likely is as resistant to radiation, ageing, disease, etc. as any super-mutant, and quite probably more.

It seems likely that his raw intelligence was also increased, but this is not demonstrated. It is possible that the psychological effects of his mutation do not allow him to focus enough to use his huge brain.

Métal Hurlant

Horrigan is permanently sealed within a custom suit of power armour. It is based on the Enclave’s version of infantry power armour, which is more advanced than most common suits from the War. This suit doubles as a life support system for Horrigan, allowing him to stay alive, mobile and presumably in good health despite his enormous, mutated metabolism.

Furthermore, Horrigan is equipped with two huge, powerful weapons that he uses with near-superhuman accuracy and speed :

1. A plasma machinegun with dedicated in-armour fusion batteries storage.
2. A “sword” that seems to be close to 6 feet long. This wicked blade is normally retracted within the body armour’s right forearm (so presumably it telescopes as well).

Between his size, mutation and power armour, Horrigan laughs at ordinary attacks. Even high-tech, high-powered infantry weapons are unlikely to inflict telling damage. It takes sustained fire from at least a dozen power armour elite troopers to seriously harm Horrigan.

The Enclave

Circa 2050, it became clear that the world ending in a nuclear war was the most likely scenario. Yet, callous, corrupt governments and corporations were more interested in profiting from the runup to the last war than in preventing it. These included the United States government.

The Feds and mega-corporations such as Vault-Tec (who were the same guys anyway) came up with a plan to :

1. Survive the apocalypse.
2. Wait for decades if not centuries for radioactivity to subside.
3. Emerge from hiding and rule the ruins.

Part of the project involved building numerous vaults to house parts of the US population. But these people were not important. They became fodder for demented experiments that might facilitate the important people’s return. Said VIPs were protected in bases completely separate from the Vaults.

The Great Silence

The nuclear exchange took place in 2077, devastating everything. The Enclave remained in hiding until 2230-ish, taking pride in their status as “pure”, unmutated humans. To them all survivors were subhuman scum with damaged DNA.

The only other undamaged humans lived in some specific Vaults. These included 13 (whence the Vault Dweller came) and 101 (whence the Lone Wanderer came, though they had been born in the Wasteland).

The headquarters of the Enclave was offshore in the Pacific. Before the war, the US had summarily annexed the last workable field of crude oil that was ever found. The huge oil rig, built by mega-corporation Poseidonis, was repurposed as a secret base for the nascent Enclave afterwards.

Many of the officials, CEOs, generals, real estate moguls, bankers, reality TV producers, etc. who had their ticket for the Enclave found refuge there when the ICBMs became inevitable. So did the President.

The return

After the Great Silence, the Enclave’s science teams continued to monitor the inhabitability of the world. The 2230s are apparently when the expeditions into the former United States started in earnest, to map out possible resources and opposition.

During the whole time the Enclave also monitored the Vault experiments. But many of the Vaults met their grotesque programmed fate before the 2200s.

There were a few Vaults that were genuinely meant to protect their population, but these do not seem to have been aligned with the Enclave. The main example is Vault 8 , which became the totalitarian Vault City after returning to the surface. It is possible that these parted ways with the Enclave over disagreements over which level of DNA damage from radiation was tolerable.

Beacheads

The Enclave had monitored to an unknown extent the rise of the Master during the 2150s. Whether they realised how much of a threat he posed is unclear. The Master was destroyed in 2162 by the Vault Dweller. The Dweller also blew up the mutagenic vats under the Mariposa military base , where the Master had been “building” his army of super-mutants.

Thus, Mariposa was an important objective during the 2230s, when Enclave fire teams aboard Vertibird  transport aircrafts reconned across the West Coast. However, the Master’s facilities were right buried. Undeterred, the Enclave’s troops reduced hundreds of locals into slavery, and forced them to unearth the site.

The Enclave also established a hidden FOB  in Navarro. Furthermore, they captured various mutated creatures, with an apparent focus on those breeds that were being artificially created just before the Fire Deluge. In particular, they experimented with uplifting  deathclaws and recreating the cyberdog technology.

Legacy of the Master, part 1

The dig at Mariposa was eventually successful, though there were losses – including Horrigan, as will be explained in the History section. Most were caused by FEV seeping into the air of the mines, affecting the unprotected in a much more rapid and thorough fashion than modelled.

Though the Enclave troops could be issued with additional protective equipment, the miners were expendable. However, the FEV continued to work faster than anticipated, and the miners had been plotting. They had hidden weapons and their most visibly mutated members.

Frank Horrigan character model rotation.

Eventually they arose, killing a number of Enclave troopers. This forced a retreat and blowing up the entrance of the mine to trap the new super-mutants within.

However, the Enclave cared little about the fate of its soldiers, and the mission had been successful. A pure sample of the Forced Evolution Virus had been secured and shipped back to the oil rig.

There, Enclave researchers determined that it could eventually be turned into a selective biological doomsday weapon. The Enclave-modified FEV could be pumped into the atmosphere to kill humans and mutants worldwide, and let the inoculated Enclave elite take control of the twice-slaughtered planet.

Legacy of the Master, part 2

Modifying the Master’s version of the FEV took years, and there still was the matter of testing it.

In 2241 or 2242, the project was sufficiently advanced for large-scale beta tests. The Enclave tricked Vault 13, which was to remain closed for at least 200 years, into opening its doors. They then sent in their experimental deathclaw uplifts to kidnap the population. Hundreds of prisoners were flown to the oil rig.

The Vault 13 captives having undamaged DNA, they served as Guinea Pigs to make sure that so-called “real” humans could be inoculated against the Enclave’s FEV. As it turned out, many refinements to the vaccine were necessary.

As part of the ongoing tests, the Enclave elected to capture descendants of the Vault 13 dwellers who had left the Vault two generations ago. This provided a very similar group, but with Wasteland-damaged DNA.

However, the latter drew the attention of the Chosen One, a great adventurer of the wastes. The One soon struck to free the surviving prisoners, utterly destroying the Enclave’s oil rig and all aboard.

Final state

By the time the Enclave was destroyed in 2242, the President of the United States of America — the head of the Enclave — was one Dick Richardson.

His VP was one Daniel Bird, who was left mentally diminished by experiments with vaccines against the Enclave’s variant over the Master’s FEV. Bird being exposed to immature versions of the vaccine may have been the result of political infighting.

Richardson had been repeatedly elected by Congress, though it is unclear exactly what the Enclave calls “Congress”. He seemed quite worn, and may have been on chems and/or sick.

Like many Enclave members he seemed partly divorced from reality after living all his life in a closed, psychologically unhealthy environment with low diversity. Like many Enclave members, he considered that any person that was not like senior Enclave members had no worth whatsoever, except perhaps as cannon fodder.

Though President Richardson was slain by the Chosen One, it is possible that he was a part of President Eden, his successor. But that is another tale, that of the Lone Wanderer.

History

Frank Horrigan was a member of the Secret Service serving President Richardson. He also apparently served in an Enclave military unit that considered itself the inheritor of the United States Marines Corps.

At age 25, he was present at the Mariposa excavation site where he was contaminated by FEV emanations.

Though Horrigan became a sort of “super-super-mutant”, he wasn’t terminated. Enclave scientists and engineers extensively experimented on him and optimised the effects of his mutation, turning him into a one-man army.

A typical Enclave Vertibird. Click for an expanded version, where you can see the rest of the pad and nearby security and maintenance facilities.

Horrigan was permanently integrated into a suit of power armor that covered him entirely, and nobody referred to him as a mutant. He was mostly reframed as an experimental super-soldier.

But even with this bit of spin-doctoring, everybody hated Horrigan – including Horrigan. He was kept at arm’s length by almost everyone, and the Enclave kept sending him into the worst situations with those few soldiers who would work with him.

This was successful, since almost nothing could kill Horrigan and he could kill just about everything.

The fist of pure mankind

Though he was still Secret Service, Horrigan largely worked as a one-man death squad. Documented missions include:

• Raiding the small, discreet Brotherhood of Steel outpost in San Francisco. Horrigan tore apart the sole Brother at the outpost in seconds, ignoring his plasma rifle fire. This likely didn’t impact Brotherhood activities much, though.
• Leading the second raid on Vault 13, once the Enclave’s uplifted deathclaws had been determined to be more intelligent and ethical than planned. The job was to eradicate the entire deathclaw clan in a pitched indoors battle. All deathclaws within were killed (though at least one  had been outside during the raid, thus surviving).

When the Chosen One invaded the Enclave’s oil rig, Horrigan couldn’t respond in time to save President Richardson. A sufficient alarm was only sounded once the Chosen One demolished the rig’s core nuclear systems, dooming the complex to go up in an atomic fireball.

Since it was too late and the Chosen One was anonymous in full Enclave power armour, Frank Horrigan positioned himself at the sole access between the oil rig and the docked tanker. He would kill anything that tried to leave, to guarantee that the Chosen One wouldn’t get away with it.

In our sample playthrough, part 1

FWIW, in our sample playthrough the Chosen One rallied an elite Enclave team to her. These men were standing guard independently of Horrigan, not knowing that the oil rig was doomed.

Ms. Hassan had stolen the identity of an Enclave captain back in Navarro. She pretended to be her, and bullshitted something about Horrigan having gone postal and having murdered the President. She also explained, with credible details, how the Secret Service man had set the nuclear core to detonate.

Having never liked Horrigan and unwilling to just stand there until they were atomised, these men moved out to take on Horrigan and reach the tanker.

In our sample playthrough, part 2

Meanwhile, still in Enclave power armour and accompanied by an Enclave cyberdog, Hassan entered the lobby that Horrigan was guarding. However, she pointedly jogged in the other direction, toward the security systems rather than the exit. She yelled something encouraging and generic at Horrigan.

Using the President’s personal emergency keycard, she then activated the automated turrets in the lobby. Normally meant to cut assaulters to ribbons, they also had a hidden Sedition Mode where they would kill anybody on the President’s order.

Thus, the lobby was soon a bullets hell. Even Horrigan couldn’t stand the thousands of rounds that were fired by the turrets and the Enclave squad. Meanwhile, Hassan gunned down her supposed allies with Bozar bursts. Within less than a minute Hassan, K-9 and a few idle robot turrets were all that was left functioning in the ravaged lobby.

The clash between the two deadliest mutants on the West Coast was over.

Description

Horrigan is voiced by Michael Dorn (like Marcus). There’s a crude 1990s vocoder effect deforming his voice to sound mountainous.

The main illustration is the faceplate of an Enclave Advanced Power Armour MkII suit. Horrigan’s faceplate is presumably identical to this.

Personality

Horrigan appears to be a psychotic, bloodthirsty mountain of hatred. He particularly hates mutants and “reds”. And as he sees it, every Wastelander is a mutant and anybody not aligned with the Enclave is a Communist.

Quotes

“You’ve gotten a lot farther than you should have, but then you haven’t met Frank Horrigan either. Your ride’s over, mutie. Time to die.”

“Making our reactor melt down means things are going to be pretty hot in here soon. Pity you won’t live long enough to see it. You’re not a hero, you’re just a walking corpse.”

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: Fallout 2 (1998 video game).

Helper(s): Darci.

Writeup completed on the 11^th of February, 2017.