Dean Domino

Dean Domino, also known as the King of Swing, is a famous pre-War lounge singer, now ghoulified and trapped in the Sierra Madre Villa in 2281.

Background
Domino and his orchestra gave performances across the United States and Europe (including Paris, and had a particularly bad experience in Madrid), including the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip.

He was eventually invited to perform at the Sierra Madre, but there he quickly found himself in the shadow of the casino's founder, Frederick Sinclair. While Domino was quite irritated by this, it was the fact that Sinclair, despite suffering several quite severe financial losses throughout the 2070s, still maintained an unwavering optimistic and easy-going attitude that especially triggered his ire. Soon, Domino found himself consumed with jealousy and he became single-mindedly determined to put Sinclair "in his place" by taking everything from him that he held dear. He enlisted the help of his former lover Vera Keyes, a starlet who had caught Sinclair's eye. Domino introduced them to each other as part of his plan to break into the casino vault, where he would take whatever it was that Sinclair had there that was so important. However, Keyes got cold feet, so in order to ensure her continued cooperation, Domino began to blackmail her with evidence of a Med-X addiction, unaware that her addiction was a result of her being terminally ill. His final gig was to be at the Tampico, but that all changed when the bombs dropped; the security holograms activated and the Gala Event turned into a massacre.

Domino survived the apocalypse, during which he began to undergo ghoulification. He stubbornly refused to let go of the Sierra Madre's treasure, having become obsessed with it, and so spent the next two hundred years evading and mapping out the casino's security system, while plotting his grand heist, oblivious to the fact that Sinclair had long since discovered Domino's plan and prepared a trap within the casino vault. However, he was captured by Dog, fitted with an explosive collar, and forced to work for Father Elijah in breaking into the casino (and already managed to trigger the Gala event at least once for him). Although his ability to obtain the treasure may have diminished with this development, his lust for it most certainly has not. Nor did his desire for freedom: Dean has killed several victims Elijah tried to use to crack the Sierra Madre, in order to examine the workings of their collars and figure out a way to remove his own.

Needing a replacement for Keyes' part of his plan, Domino finally found an opportunity when Christine Royce was captured by Dog and brought to the Sierra Madre. While she was still out cold, he dragged her to the Villa's clinic and placed her in an Auto-Doc, which he programmed to perform surgery on her vocal cords, altering her voice to sound like Keyes', so she could at some point be used to unlock the vault. It was something of a leap in the dark on his part, as he actually held some doubt towards Royce making the intended recovery from the procedure.

Personality and abilities
Domino is a quick thinker, and is quite skilled with guns, specifically pistols, having spent some of his free time back in the pre-War days at the shooting range, and uses a knife for a sidearm. He is very paranoid, setting up many booby traps and hiding several 'secret stashes' throughout the Villa.

Dean has a rather fragile ego, and is very vengeful towards anyone who bruises it, making sure they meet dire consequences down the line. Expressing irritation, aggression, or contempt will earn his ire, as well as challenging his sense of self importance, as he will double cross able partners simply because he perceives their competence a personal insult. His voice has been unaltered by ghoulification; it remains clear as opposed to gravelly like other ghouls.

Quests

 * Find Collar 14: Dean Domino: The player character has to find and recruit Dean in the Residential District.
 * Strike Up the Band: Escort Dean to Puesta del Sol south for him to connect a circuit.
 * Curtain Call at the Tampico: The player character has to confront Dean in the Sierra Madre Casino & Resort in the Tampico and can choose to either let him go free or kill him.
 * Heist of the Centuries: If the player has stayed on good terms with Dean and did not kill him during Curtain Call at the Tampico, he will assist the player by deactivating the speakers during the last fight with Elijah.

Effects of player's actions

 * If the first Barter check near the end of Find Collar 14: Dean Domino quest is passed, Domino will be made suspicious and angry at the Courier and will have unique dialogue then and throughout Dead Money expressing that. If one upsets Domino in this instance, it will affect his fate at the end of the main story line and makes keeping Dean Domino alive impossible.

Other interactions

 * Domino can make Sierra Madre martinis, and can give the Courier the Sierra Madre Martini perk with the correct dialogue choices.
 * Low-intelligence characters (3 or below), upon first meeting Domino, will have several options to say nothing more than questioning sounds, like "Hnh?" and "Ummmm.", which achieves nothing but frustrating Domino.

Companion comments

 * He has unique idle dialogue for locations around the Sierra Madre:

Appearances
Dean Domino appears in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Dead Money, and is mentioned in Fallout: New Vegas and its add-on Lonesome Road.

Behind the scenes

 * Dean Domino is an amalgamation of Dean Martin, an Italian-American singer/actor/comedian, and Fats Domino, an American rock and roll pianist and singer-songwriter. The Dean Domino poster resembles those of Fats Domino.
 * When asked about the nature of the ghost people, Dean will attempt to quote (though incorrectly both times) the famous exchange between Hamlet and Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."


 * If the player character has the Wild Wasteland trait, Dean will reference Army of Darkness when he kills a ghost person for the first time, saying "he's not dead, it's a trick. Get an axe."

Bugs

 * If you kill Dean on a set of stairs, his body might glitch out of the map.
 * Sometimes, when Dean is knocked unconscious, he may never wake up until you restart a save, or enter a new area.
 * Right after killing Dean on the stairs, a message might come up and say: "Dean is dead" over and over even after clicking Ok.
 * If Dean is talked to while he is still marked as "hostile", it will remove the hostile tag, making the quest unable to be completed.
 * Dean's tuxedo will show as equipped on Dean's unconscious body upon first entering the Sierra Madre lobby from the Villa even if it was taken from him by the player character and automatically replaced with a Dead Money jumpsuit.