I’m not back to work on this just yet, since I need to still finish the first chapter of Heroes on a Budget, which can be found here: Heroes on a Budget - An RPG where the heroes get fat off of healing items
but while I was taking a break on it, I was playing new vegas and had another idea that I wanted to commit to a post.
My idea was for a new companion was basically a Fiend that instead of having a normal chem addiction, her vice would be for Sunset Sarsaparilla. Not as cruel or sadistic as the other fiends, but I wouldn’t say the character would be a good karma character either. Like Arcade or Boone, she will require some extra convincing (speech or a lot of Sarsaparilla up front) to join you initially if you have a high NCR reputation. She will leave if you killed all of the Fiend leaders (will be hostile by default if you did that before meeting her), and might leave if you complete the quest “How little we know” and turn it in for the NCR’s main quest (high speech or if you gave her a lot of Sarsaparilla could be used to let her stay).
She’d be found in the SS bottling plant, since that location is pretty heavily into Fiend territory.
I haven’t worked out much for her story yet (beyond wanting to get the “treasure” from star bottle cap collection challenge), but her I did think of the companion perk.
The perk when she is in the party would make the Fiends non hostile towards the player, giving her a bottle of Sunset Sarsaparilla will result in her gaining weight and have a much higher chance of giving you a star bottle cap (after the bottle cap quest is complete, she will instead pay for the bottle’s value in caps), and drinking Sunset Sarsaparilla would give the player a temporary boost to luck.