My Stupid FNV “Fantastic” Story

I have been playing New Vegas for years now, and I confess to actually having done the final quest only 3 times in total, 2 as Independent and 1 NCR (I have a tendency to create new character builds frequently, owing to FNV's amazing replayability :^D).

Well, in said NCR playthrough, I completed the "That Lucky Old Sun" quest sending power to The Strip & McCarran, causing Mr. Fantastic (the star of this show) to receive a considerable promotion for his remarkable contributions to the interests of the Republic, from Helios One admin, to "goddamn dam god". Fair enough, I mean, the guy IS Fantastic after all.

That was when that character, a gun-slinging Cowboy build with no Science skill investment, was maybe around level 14-ish. After that, I continued the playthrough as normal: I helped the NCR in anyway I could, blissfully blasted Legionnaires at any chance I got, convinced a community of trigger-happy crazy bastards to bomb the sh*t out of the East side of Hoover Dam, peacefully resolved the conflict between the NCR and a bunch of local smooth-talking Elvis wannabes, tried to seduce Ms. Rose of Sharon Cassidy (emphasis on tried, even though I had High Speech and the Lady Killer perk, but I digress), replaced a robot-dog's brain, helped a community of Super Mutants and Nightkin… you know, the usual. The point is, by then, I had almost completely forgotten about Mr. Fantastic and his stupid sunglasses.

Near the "end" of the playthrough, I was on Hoover Dam, just walking around, getting to know the place, instead of just going straight to Lt. Boyd as I was used to do at that point. Imagine my surprise when, among all the workers and engineers, I spotted a stupid familiar face, looking at me through his stupid sunglasses: Mr. Fan-f*cking-tastic in the flesh. Not skipping a beat, I went to say hi to my friend, and he rambled on about his very important task in this whole operation, which, in layman's terms, was just pressing a button to change the flow of water in some pipes. "Okay," I thought, "it's a nice detail that the devs actually had a sort of conclusion written for his story". I didn't think anything more of it at that time and carried on with the game.

Que the final Quest, "Eureka!", to change the fate of the Mojave forever. I was shooting Centurions and Prime Legionnaires left, right and center, making my way to the Dam's flow control console to chop some sneaky Legion boys to pieces with the turbines, and when I finally made it there, I was shocked to find a prompt with a Science skill check my character had no chance in hell of passing no matter what. I felt a brief moment of disappointment as I was about to miss the chance to screw even more with the Legion, when I noticed the second option in the prompt:

"Press the button Fantastic said and divert the flow of the turbines" (or something along those lines)

Needless to say, I laughed like an idiot after realizing that the small conversation I had previously with Fantastic in the Dam, which seemed totally inconsequential at the time, actually had led to unlocking an alternative on this particular stage of the final fight between the NCR and the Legion, turning the tides of battle in favor of the NCR.

And that was how I fell in love with this game for the 7th time.

Tl;dr: Stupid sunglasses-wearing "genius" made local man fall in love with videogame all over again.

PS: I looked through the Fallout: New Vegas Wiki, and could not find any mention of this, neither on Fantastic's page or Eureka!'s. Has somebody else encountered this on their game? Or was I just tripping balls that whole time? I swear it's real.