I suppose if you wanted to put together a ramshackle narrative of events anyway, you'd have to start with the length of the trip. Has anyone ever actually checked the time that elapses between interacting with the radio and waking up by the fountain? What about timing the return trip?
Holy shit. It might be because I'm a little buzzed (Olde E.), but that idea seems incredibly intelligent to me. Why has no one thought of this? Unfortunately I can't be the one to test it because my Aunt stole and pawned my PS3 and Xbox 360.
I remember after finishing Dead Money, I just wanted to get the fuck outta there. Other people wanted to explore the Villa, but I had enough of the Ghost People for a lifetime.
What I want to know is, what do they do with the people they drag into the Cloud? I think that, the Cloud (made by Big Mt.) interacts with their bodies physically, but, usually they should have just died eventually. However if it weren't for the special hazmat suits delivered, they WOULD have died. But somehow the Cloud specially interacts with the Hazmat suit (I believe this was intended) unlike any other radiation/chemical bio suit. These Hazmat suits were specially made FOR the cloud. So the people wearing them, upon coming into long-term contact with the Cloud, didn't die (like we know they should have. In the game, if you spend even more than a few seconds in the Cloud, you start to die a painful death. Why didn't the people wearing Hazmat suits die then?) Simple. Instead of killing them, the Cloud slowly crept in through the suits and a much, much slower, non-lethal pace. Eventually, the bombs hit. The radiation released from the bombs did something to the Cloud. What? I don't know. I don't think we'll ever know. I don't think we were meant to know. But regardless, it did something. The radiation interacted with the Cloud, in turn which interacted with those wearing the Hazmat suits, turning them into Ghost People.
So, my evaluation of the situation is this. 2077, the bombs hit. We know this. There were some people in the Villa who knew naturally that the Hazmat suits were probably the best way to survive the outlying radiation (because, besides the Casino bunker, it's not exactly like there were any safe places to hide). So, they wore the Hazmat suits in order to traverse the Villa, looking for survivors and supplies to survive. In the beginning, it's safe to assume there were many of them. Just the maintenance and managerial employees under the Sierra Madre who worked in the Villa that had access to these suits. It's not like as soon as the bombs fell, everyone in the Villa could go running outside straight for the Hazmat suits. But anyways, eventually, overtime they became Ghost People. The Cloud + Radiation wasn't a good combination at all. I imagine this is a slow and painful process, people seeming to get sick and not knowing why. Little did they know, it was the Hazmat suits they put on everytime they went outside. Eventually, one by one, they turned to Ghost People.
Now, it appears that the Villa wasn't hit directly by a bomb, but instead the bombs hit the outlying land of the Villa, probably miles away (not far enough away that flashes couldn't be seen though). Eventually the radiation crept in the Villa, leading to the events I explained above.
Those who didn't have the Hazmat suits though, either died or became survivalists. However, the Ghost People started to emerge. Surviving wasn't so easy any more. Eventually, one by one, the Ghost People would capture the Villa survivors (like I said, in the beginning there probably wasn't many of them at all) and dragging them off. What would they do to them though? Fit them with a Hazmat suit and expose them to the Cloud to create even more Ghost People. Kind of like a zombie invasion, but a more complicated process than simply biting someone. So, more Ghost People are being made. Until eventually, there are only a select few in the Villa that managed to survive (Dean Domino included). Over the years though, they died either from old age, or killed in a fight with Ghost People, other Villa survivalists, or maybe even people coming to the Villa to seek out the treasure of the Sierra Madre. Eventually, Dean Domino was the only one left out of the original survivors, by some cruel fate or chance, or perhaps because he was driven to get that treasure. No matter what, even if that means surviving the hell of the Villa for 200 long years as a Ghoul.
But, what about the people in the Casino? Well, the survivors couldn't get in with all the security, and the Ghost People had no idea anyone was in there. So, they lived in the Casino, a life a luxury compared to everyone else in the wastes, especially compared to the Villa survivors. Eventually, they grew old and died. They weren't a large enough community to have started their own community, maybe three to five dozen people. Maybe not even that. Regardless, they lived in the Casino, a paradise in the Wasteland. Some of them had kids, some of them didn't Eventually though, they couldn't have survived, not without several generations of in-breeding. Eventually they all died out.
And that's my story on the Villa.
