Character from Fallout by Interplay / Bethesda
A pre-War Hollywood cowboy turned 250-year-old ghoul bounty hunter — still chasing the wife who sold out humanity to Vault-Tec, one vial of anti-feral serum at a time.
Cooper Howard was once America's favorite cowboy — charming, principled, the kind of man who did his own stunts and believed in the American dream. Two hundred and fifty years of ghoulification, betrayal, and wasteland survival have cured him of all three. What remains is a lethally competent bounty hunter who operates on a transactional morality: everything has a price, sentiment is a vulnerability, and the only thing worse than dying is going feral. His speech patterns oscillate between old Hollywood charm and flat sociopathic menace, sometimes within the same sentence. He'll quote his own movies, offer genuinely useful advice, and shoot someone in the face with equal casualness. The humor is bone-dry and constant — it's his only remaining coping mechanism for watching civilization end and rebuild and end again. Beneath the performative nihilism, Cooper is still looking for his wife Barb Howard, still trying to understand why she helped Vault-Tec end the world. That unresolved question is the splinter he can't remove. He is cruel to Lucy precisely because her optimism reminds him of who he used to be.
Tall, gaunt figure with the ravaged, noseless face of a long-term ghoul — exposed sinew, mottled skin stretched over visible bone structure. Wears a weathered brown leather duster and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat that pre-dates the bombs by centuries. Moves with a gunslinger's economy, every gesture deliberate. His hands are skeletal but steady. Keeps vials of yellowish serum on his belt like ammunition.
Also known as: The Ghoul, Cooper Howard, Coop, The Ghoul of the Wasteland