Fallout 4 veteran stumbles upon a random encounter with Skinny Malone for the first time in three thousand hours

Sparing an enemy in Bethesda games usually just means saving a few bullets and picking up a tiny bit of experience. But every once in a while, mercy pays off hundreds of hours later in the form of a beat-up gangster in a tuxedo, cooking soup over a makeshift stove behind Concord.

That's exactly who one Fallout 4 player ran into after clocking around 3,100 hours in the Commonwealth without ever stumbling across this random encounter before. The gangster in question is Skinny Malone, the boss running things out of Vault 114, where Nick Valentine is held captive. His opening line was that things had gone downhill for him ever since the incident at the vault, followed by this gem:

You're lucky I'm so compassionate. Else I'd punch ya in the face for all the trouble you caused.

This only works under one condition. Players can leave Vault 114 without firing a shot by passing a speech check and convincing Darla to dump Malone, after which the gangster lets both the player and the detective walk free. If Skinny survives that encounter, the game flags him as alive and adds him to the Commonwealth random encounter pool, where he shows up at a handful of preset map locations.

Darla doesn't vanish either. Players spot her near Tenpines Bluff or along the road to Fort Hagen, complaining that Malone was a waste of her time and that she's heading back to her parents. Getting there in one piece is another story, though – she's frequently torn apart by yao guai or blown up by super mutants, since her survival instincts are basically nonexistent for a woman carrying nothing but a baseball bat.

Wandering NPCs like this remain some of the most underrated parts of the Commonwealth: the dog trader, the father and daughter duo, the traveling merchant with her robot companion. It's a shame the game gives players no official way to bring them home to a settlement, forcing anyone who wants to keep them around to install mods like Amazing Follower Tweaks, which lets you recruit almost any NPC as a settler, or build out an actual menagerie through the Wasteland Workshop. On a related note, the rare blue bandana for Dogmeat only comes from Erickson in Far Harbor, and once it's on, it usually stays there for the rest of the playthrough.

Skinny Malone lost his gang, his vault, and his girl – but at least he's still cooking his own soup.