Victoria Watts

Victoria Watts is a resident in Rivet City in Fallout 3 in the year 2277. She is involved in The Replicated Man quest.

Background
Ms. Watts is involved in an organization called The Railroad which, like its namesake, works to protect escaped android slaves. She has traveled to Rivet City to protect the identity of Harkness.

Daily Schedule
Prior to the beginning of the Replicated Man quest, Victoria Watts lives as a generic citizen of Rivet City.

After delivering her quest-related message, Victoria Watts will remain in the general area in which she first encountered you. She may attempt to travel to Rivet City, but she is incapable of fast-traveling and only moves position if the player is in the same active map cell as her. As a result, she is almost certain to be killed in the Wasteland if encountered far away from Rivet City.

If Victoria Watts reaches Rivet City, she will join the population there and perform a generic Rivet City citizen daily schedule. She can be spoken to again by the player, but has no additional dialogue.

Interactions with the player character
After you are asked by Zimmer to track down Harkness' location, for The Institute, she will request that you feign his death using an Android Component that she gives to you. If you assist her in saving Harkness, she will later ask you to not speak to her again (for the safety of The Railroad).

Aside from her travels to seek you out, she can be found on the upper balcony of the Rivet City Marketplace, near the pool table.

Victoria searches out the player character
Rather than being a random encounter, Victoria Watts seems to hone in on you. Once you have triggered the Replicated Man quest, she starts running towards you from Rivet City. Thus, the time and place of the encounter depend on where you were when you triggered her and where you happen to be by the time she's covered the distance to you. As such, you can potentially meet her anywhere, including rather incongruous locations and situations (such as inside of Arlington Library or even underwater.) She also seems to be able to go through locked doors as she has been reported to turn up in your Tenpenny Tower Suite. This can be unfortunate, however, if she happens to catch up with you in a particularly dangerous area, such as Old Olney, since she could very easily die on the way out after delivering her message.

The actual trigger for Victoria's homing instinct appears to be using dialogue options with other NPCs to ask about the android, such as when one player asked Moira about the android and was accosted by Victoria outside of Craterside Supply upon exiting. The availability of these android-related NPC dialogue options, in turn, seems to depend either on getting the quest from the main source in Rivet City, or by finding at least 2 holotapes or other notes about the android in other locations. If you have not been to Rivet City, therefore, but just innocently use the android-related dialogue options, your subsequent encounter with Victoria can be somewhat surprising, especially if it happens during a firefight (see below).

Victoria's purpose is to present the player with an ethical choice in this quest. As such, she is immortal until she delivers her message to the player. This can cause problems if the player is currently in combat. Victoria fast-travels to the player's general vicinity and then enters the 3D world at the farthest creature-appearance distance from the player. From this point, she runs toward the player. Because she is friendly to the player at this point, creatures hostile to the player will attack her. She completely ignores them (she's after you and only has a knife anyway) and they can't kill her. (You may receive a warning message saying "Victoria Watts is unconscious.") As a result, Victoria can easily run up to the player closely pursued by a whole train of enemies. This can lead to combat being interrupted by her speech, and to her being hit by stray bullets.

Appearances
Victoria Watts only appears in Fallout 3.

Bugs

 * Victoria can sometimes fail to recognize the completion of the The Replicated Man quest. If you agree to help her, then subsequently resolve the quest otherwise, she will continue to goad you to turn the component over to Dr. Zimmer and tell him Harkness is dead.
 * The GECK reveals that this bug occurs due to faulty dialogue ordering and conditioning. She should instead say "Nothing Stops the Railroad" but the dialogue string is BELOW "Don't you have a component to deliver" whereas it should be ABOVE it since the former has additional conditions. (Dialogue strings near the top of an NPC's dialogue list take priority over ones below it. A complete reversal of modification load orders.
 * Even though she approaches the player away from Rivet City, when you speak to her, she will still say that there is a man named Pinkerton "here in Rivet City" even if you are nowhere close to the place.
 * If the player asked Harkness for permission to kill Zimmer, then after the Replicated Man quest is completed it is possible to kill Victoria in the market without other NPCs becoming hostile (found on PC).