Hi,

in front of the Fort to the left of the gate there were two NPCs fighting a sixpack of those Minecrawler-Scorpion-Hybrids. I didn't go there, because several attempts to help them out resulted in me, Duras or those two dying, so I figured that maybe they were immortal until I got within a certain range and went into the Fort as initially intended.

Anyways, time has passed and I checked up on them only to find them dead. Whelp.

My question now is, do Bullet and Lucy serve any function in the main storyline, or are they merely side quests to bump my Fort approval rating up? If they are main quest characters I'll have to rollback my safe files to when they were still alive (Goodbye, two hours of my life I'll never get back! ;-( ). If they are side quest characters I'm gonna loot their corpses.

Rolling back sucks, so I'll wait for an answer before playing again. Can anyone help me out?

Worth to note in this regard that you won't see the mentioned notifications (along with a couple others like the reputation-related ones ["XXX doesn't like that" or "XXX idolizes you"] or the quest-related ones ["Mission: XXX", "Completed: XXX", etc] unless the respective feedback option is enabled (under "Gameplay" if I remember correctly).

Good old Piranha Bytes... So, them fighting was intentional, that's a relief. There's nothing more frustrating than losing a story NPC to a random encounter... AND THAT MEANS YOU, GORN! =D Feedback is always enabled. So next time I know what to look out for.

Thank you to both of you. =)

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edit 16th November:

I don't feel like bumping a dead thread so I will just edit this in here:

Bullet and Lucy are supposed to ward off the attack, but in the German forums there were several complaints that players were too weak to do anything and one or both of them died. Usually because (like me back then) the players were still low level and died easily. That's tough luck, but unless you want to become an Outlaw it's no big loss.

Once you helped Bullet and Lucy (though Lucy is not relevant to the quest, so no problem if she dies), Bullet will order you to go get reinforcements, and you can get 1-4 additional guards, depending on your survival skill. Level 1, 1 guard. Level 2, 2 guards... Once you return a new wave of more and even stronger creeps will spawn. On really bad runs there were reports of these creeps wiping the entire Fort. So you better level and gear up... you are warned! =)

I know you already got the answer, but I wanted to note something helpful here. Companions don't die, they just go down until the fight is over.