Father Elijah

Father Elijah is a former Elder of the Mojave Wasteland Brotherhood of Steel and the primary antagonist of Dead Money.

Background
A former Scribe of the Mojave Brotherhood of Steel, Elijah defied convention and rose to the rank of the Chapter's Elder, an honor usually reserved for Paladins. His leadership style was considered unorthodox, as instead of simply gathering pre-war weapons technology and hoarding it, he would dispatch Scribes to retrieve farming equipment and other beneficial technology, believing that the Brotherhood would be unable to survive without providing tech to the people of the wastes, gaining their favor and with it more recruits. His practices were not continued by his successor, but he did pass his ideas onto his protégé, Veronica Santangelo.

Yet despite his intellect and forward thinking Elijah revealed himself in time to be a brutally pragmatic and altogether unpleasant man. Christine Royce seems to imply that Elijah used his status to end her relationship with Veronica; who seems to be unaware of this judging from the reverence with which she speaks of him.

Desertion
It was not until the war with the New California Republic, dubbed Operation: Sunburst by the NCR, that Elijah's true nature became apparent to the rest of the Brotherhood. It was clear that the Brotherhood were on the losing end of the conflict, but Elijah refused to accept defeat and became obsessed with finding the technology required to defeat the NCR. Operating from the Brotherhood's HELIOS One base, he sent Paladins out on a number of missions that could be considered tactically questionable in efforts to secure vital technologies he was adamant would swing things in their favor. He eventually discovered that the secret to victory lay on his own doorstep, with the ARCHIMEDES II weapon. Though the Brotherhood position was tactically unsustainable, Elijah felt that if he could just get ARCHIMEDES functional the NCR could finally be pushed back. He stubbornly refused to give ground but salvation never came and one day Elijah simply disappeared into the wastes without a warning to anyone, not even Veronica, and was assumed to have deserted the Brotherhood. His successor, Nolan McNamara, wasted no time in gathering up the few that survived the battle at the facility and retreated to Hidden Valley.

But Elijah had not truly abandoned the Brotherhood nor his desire to see it dominant, but had in fact left to find new technologies that would save them - to find what he believed was "one of the greatest treasures of the Old World." For Elijah the Brotherhood was doomed; they needed to begin again and he would do whatever was needed, no matter how morally questionable, to ensure that came to pass. He traveled throughout the Wasteland, going as far as the Divide and spending time among the Ciphers.

Big MT
Eventually, Elijah stumbled across the Big Empty in his travels, where he found an incredible amount of rare pre-War technology. However, the trail of crimes he had left across the wastes in his years before reaching the Big Empty had not gone unnoticed and the Brotherhood soon dispatched assassins to stop him. Christine Royce was among them. It was at the Big Empty she caught up with him, but was defeated and imprisoned, becoming a subject for medical experimentation. Cybernetic modifications, one of the many Old World horrors left in the Big Empty, were implanted in her brain that damaged her perceptions of the world around her. It was also here that Elijah discovered the Sierra Madre Broadcast and the location of the casino itself, a place long thought of as a myth. He was soon forced to flee when Ulysses arrived to rescue Christine, but not before taking a supply of explosive collars, and the knowledge of the frequency at which they would explode, which was determined by experimenting on the survivors of the Little Yangtze prison camp.

To prepare for his expedition to the Sierra Madre he renovated an abandoned Brotherhood of Steel bunker as a base of operations, setting it up ready for when he managed to get his hands on the technologies it offered. In making round-trips around the Sierra Madre to his bunker, he performed analysis of The Cloud and the Sierra Madre's environment. Once ready to go to the Sierra Madre, he left a final message for Veronica in the event he did not return. As a result of his desertion, many members of The Brotherhood felt that he had betrayed the order, with some resorting to taking actions into their own hands.

Sierra Madre
Upon reaching the Sierra Madre, he found everything that he had hoped for and more. The Cloud had somehow preserved the pristine nature of the casino and prevented it from decaying in all its years of disuse, in addition to serving as a deadly deterrent to potential intruders. He marveled at the casino's automated security systems - the invulnerable Holograms, perfected versions of the technology he had found at the Big Empty. A single one of these holograms, deployed in the right place, would become a one-man army, massively powerful and almost impossible to defeat with conventional weapons. But the potential of these paled in comparison to a relatively innocuous technology: the Sierra Madre vending machines. These machines functioned as a sort of molecular assembler, taking Sierra Madre chips and using the raw material in their composition to assemble various alcohols and clothes as rewards for gamblers. The potential for these had already been partially realized before the war, as medical staff and construction crews had used them to generate medical supplies and explosives. But Elijah had grander ideas. He could use the machines to create any object he desired, and provide the same luxury to the people of the wasteland. He could create a new world where the very concept of "need" was eliminated, a new world with the Brotherhood of Steel at its head and the Sierra Madre at its heart.

However, Elijah also found that he could not unlock the secrets of the casino's vault alone. He used his explosive collars to coerce captives into trapping other fortune seekers lured by the Sierra Madre's signal, forming a chain that eventually grew into teams conscripted to do Elijah's bidding - or die. Eventually he found a new way of starting the chain in the form of Dog, a nightkin whose overwhelming need for a master figure allowed Elijah to bend him easily to his will even without an explosive collar. Human nature got the better of these teams though, and as soon as they became close to the treasure they all felt they could take it for themselves, inevitably turning on one another. One team managed to actually get Elijah into the heart of the casino, but after their deaths, Elijah found himself trapped and alone. So he modified the signals controlling the collars to add an extra condition: if one person died, they all would die. Unable to communicate with Dog and the outside, Elijah assumed this would be his end, until Dog, automatically acting on orders given to him long ago, brought to the casino a prisoner with a Pip-Boy 3000, someone with whom Elijah was capable of communicating. Elijah would be free to go, assuming he could bear to leave behind the casino and and all its secrets.

He guided the Courier and the three remaining collars of the Sierra Madre - Dog, Christine Royce and Dean Domino. There, he ordered them to trigger the Gala Event to reopen the doors of the Sierra Madre Casino. Once inside, the Courier managed with Elijah's instruction to arrive in the Sierra Madre Vault, where Elijah came out of hiding and a confrontation ensued.


 * (Much refrences to him from add-ons and BoS.)

Quests

 * Find Collar 8: "Dog": Elijah sends you out to recruit Dog. He's found somewhere in the Villa Police Station.
 * Find Collar 12: Christine: Elijah sends you out to recruit Christine Royce. She's found somewhere in the Villa Clinic.
 * Find Collar 14: Dean Domino: Elijah sends you out to recruit Dean Domino. He's found somewhere in the Residential District.
 * Heist of the Centuries: The player can join forces or imprison Elijah inside the Sierra Madre vault.

Endings

 * Elijah is killed fighting the Courier
 * Elijah meets his end abruptly in the Vault, where he fights the Courier and falls in single combat. His corpse, along with that of Fredrick Sinclair, lies in the now totally inaccessible Vault forever.


 * Elijah is locked in the Vault
 * Elijah, lured by the promise of the Sierra Madre, cannot escape. Once inside the vault, the casino does not let go. When Elijah finally passes away, the casino creates a new Hologram to walk with the other ghosts that fill its casino. It is a pre-programmed homage intended for another. It assumes a new meaning in the likeness of Elijah. A means of allowing even the dead to begin again.


 * Elijah and the Courier join forces
 * In the years that follow, the legend of the Sierra Madre fade, and there are no new visitors to the city. Years later, when a mysterious blood red cloud begins to roll across the Mojave, then West toward the Republic, no one knows where it comes from. Only that it brings death in its wake. Attempts to find the source of the toxic cloud fail. The Mojave is cut off. Through the Cloud, lights are seen from HELIOS One. There are stories of ghosts immune to gunfire, who strike down anyone they see with rays of light. The last chapter of the Mojave comes when a modified REPCONN rocket strikes Hoover Dam, releasing a blood-red cloud, killing all stationed there. All attempts to penetrate the Cloud and re-take the Dam fail, and both the NCR and Legion finally turn away from it, citing the place as cursed. In the years that follow, communities across the West begin to die as traces of the Cloud begin to drift over lands held by the NCR. Only two remain alive in the depths of the Cloud, at the Sierra Madre, waiting for their new world to begin again.

Quotes

 * ''"That thing on your wrist - it's a convenience. It tells you where to go, what to do, dulls the brain."
 * ''"Do this, I'll let you go... I'll let all of you go."
 * ''"You! Think you can run? Think you can trick me!?"

Appearances
is mentioned in Fallout: New Vegas and in Old World Blues, and appears in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on, Dead Money.

Behind the scenes

 * Remaining orphan text strings in the game files indicate that he was initially named Abraham and connected to an accelerator quest. This may explain why he is called "Father" Elijah; his original name may be a reference to Abraham from the Bible and the children's song "Father Abraham".

Elijah Старейшина Элайджа