Veronica Santangelo

Veronica Santangelo is one of the possible companions that The Courier may acquire and a Brotherhood of Steel scribe found in Mojave.

Background
Veronica is born in 2254 in California. She is a Brotherhood of Steel journeyman scribe who has been indefinitely assigned to the role of "procurement specialist", responsible for venturing out of the Brotherhood bunker to find and acquire resources that the Brotherhood cannot create on its own such as food. Irritated by what she sees as the Brotherhood’s unrealistic and uninformed views of themselves and the world, Veronica is a perpetual outsider caught between her loyalty to the Brotherhood and troubling doubts about the validity of their current course.

Veronica was born and raised in the Brotherhood. Her father was a paladin, her mother a scribe. In her youth she fell in love with a woman, who is implied to be Christine Royce, but Father Elijah split them up. Because the Brotherhood is not open to outsiders, many of its members felt that it was their duty to procreate and frowned upon same-sex relationships. Later in dialogue, she laments that both of her parents were killed in the same battle defending a position whose name and significance she no longer remembers, saying "Guess it seemed important at the time."

After following the Brotherhood to the Mojave Wasteland from California, Veronica became disillusioned with their goals. The Mojave Chapter's Elder and her personal mentor, Elijah, had changed the direction of the Brotherhood somewhat by dispatching Scribes to recover beneficial technology instead of just weaponry, but after he abandoned the Brotherhood after their defeat at Helios One, his successor, Nolan McNamara, upped stakes and holed up in the Hidden Valley bunker, dispatching scouts only to assess the threat posed by the NCR. She felt that McNamara was too much of an isolationist, and by hiding away and hoarding technology instead of using it to win favor with the people of the Wasteland and attract new recruits, he was just going to "wait in a hole for everyone else to die".

Veronica felt that if the Brotherhood was to survive, things were going to have to change. She began to speak up about her beliefs, questioning the direction the Brotherhood was taking. In order to keep her out of the Brotherhood's hair and to stop her dissent from spreading, the Head Scribe sent her on longer and longer excursions out into the wasteland, allegedly to collect resources. It is on such an excursion that her fateful meeting with the Courier occurs.