Elijah Father Elijah is a former elder of the Brotherhood of Steel and is the primary antagonist of " Dead Money " in 2281 . Background . A former scribe of the Brotherhood of Steel , Elijah defied convention and rose to the rank of the Mojave Chapter ' s elder , an honor usually reserved for paladins and knights . His leadership style was considered unorthodox , as instead of simply gathering pre - War weapons technology and hoarding it , he would dispatch scribes to retrieve farming equipment and other beneficial technology , believing that the Brotherhood would be unable to survive without providing tech to the people of the wastes , gaining their favor and with it more recruits . His practices were not continued by his successor , but he did pass his ideas onto his protégée , Veronica Santangelo . Despite his intellect and forward thinking , Elijah revealed himself in time to be a brutally pragmatic and altogether unpleasant man . Desertion . It was not until the war with the New California Republic , dubbed by the NCR , that Elijah ' s true nature became apparent to the rest of the Brotherhood . It was clear that the Brotherhood was on the losing end of the conflict , but Elijah refused to accept defeat and became obsessed with finding the technology required to defeat the NCR . Operating from the Brotherhood ' s HELIOS One base , he sent paladins out on a number of missions that could be considered tactically questionable in efforts to secure vital technologies he was adamant would swing things in their favor . He eventually discovered that the secret to victory lay on his own doorstep , with the ARCHIMEDES I weapon . Though the Brotherhood position was tactically unsustainable , Elijah felt that if he could just get ARCHIMEDES functional , the NCR could finally be pushed back . He stubbornly refused to give ground , but salvation never came and Elijah simply disappeared into the wastes without a warning to anyone , not even Veronica , and was assumed to have deserted the Brotherhood . His successor , Nolan McNamara , wasted no time in gathering up the few that survived the battle at the facility and retreating to Hidden Valley . But Elijah had not truly abandoned the Brotherhood , nor his desire to see it dominant , but had in fact left to find new technologies that would save them ; to find what he believed was " one of the greatest treasures of the Old World . " For Elijah the Brotherhood was doomed ; they needed to begin again and he would do whatever was needed , no matter how morally questionable , to ensure that came to pass . He traveled throughout the wasteland , going as far as the Divide and spending time among the Ciphers . Big MT . Eventually , Elijah stumbled across Big MT , where he found an incredible amount of rare pre - War technology . Captured temporarily by the Think Tank upon his arrival , he managed to escape in seconds , much to the shock of the brain bots . In the great expanse of Big Mountain , Elijah ran into another human , a courier , who spoke to him of the legend of the Sierra Madre . Making his way to Little Yangtze , he experimented on the survivors of the prison camp with explosive collar s while , curiosity getting the better of him , seeking out the radio frequency until finally tracking down a faint broadcast . Avoiding the local robots and suffering from migraines through the overuse of , Elijah fine - tuned both the collars and the radio signal . Now , with the location of the mythical casino and his collars ready , his grand plan to defeat the New California Republic was ever so close to fruition . However , the trail of crimes he had left across the wastes in the years preceding his arrival had not gone unnoticed , and a hardline faction of the Brotherhood soon dispatched assassins to stop him . Christine Royce was one of them . Catching a glimmer from a sniper scope , Elijah instinctively sensed the worst . He held out in the tower for a while , sniping the Think Tank ' s robots with his Tesla Cannon as they funneled through . Elijah began strategically detonating his subjects ' collars to make his getaway as Christine attempted her assassination . She was defeated , becoming a subject for medical experimentation as she was dragged away to the Y - 17 medical facility . Cybernetic modifications , one of the many Old World horrors left in the Big Empty , were implanted in her brain that damaged her perceptions of the world around her . Hacking into the think tank mainframe as the Big MT ' s robots closed in , Elijah fried Doctor 8 ' s voice module and rerouted Doctor 0 ' s processors to take control of the train network . Via remote control , he directed a train into one of the tunnels , creating a path for his escape through the wreckage . Leaving his retrofitted LAER rifles and jury - rigged Tesla cannon behind , he then set off towards the Sierra Madre with a , several explosive collars , a Holorifle and , crucially , the knowledge that could make the Mojave his and his alone . To prepare for his expedition , he renovated an abandoned Brotherhood of Steel bunker as a base of operations in the Mojave . Setting it up for when he managed to get his hands on the technology hidden away in the Sierra Madre that he coveted so much . In making round - trips from the Sierra Madre to his bunker , he performed analyses of the Cloud samples he procured and had even managed to bring back a Sierra Madre vending machine for his own personal use . Once ready to go to the Sierra Madre , he left a final message for Veronica in the event he did not return . Sierra Madre . Upon reaching the Sierra Madre , he found everything that he had hoped for and more . The Cloud had somehow preserved the pristine nature of the casino and prevented it from decaying in all its years of disuse , in addition to serving as a deadly deterrent to potential intruders . He marveled at the casino ' s automated security systems - the invulnerable , perfected versions of the technology he had found at the Big Empty . A single one of these holograms , deployed in the right place , would become a one - man army , massively powerful and almost impossible to defeat with conventional weapons . But the potential of these paled in comparison to a relatively innocuous technology : the Sierra Madre vending machine s . These machines functioned as a sort of , taking Sierra Madre chip s and using the raw material in their composition to assemble various alcohols and clothes as rewards for gamblers . The potential for these had already been partially realized before the war , as medical staff and construction crews had used them to generate medical supplies and explosives . But Elijah had grander ideas . He could use the machines to create any object he desired , and provide the same luxury to the people of the wasteland . He could create a new world where the very concept of " need " was eliminated , a new world with the Brotherhood of Steel at its head and the Sierra Madre at its heart . However , Elijah also found that he could not unlock the secrets of the casino ' s vault alone . He used his explosive collars to coerce captives into trapping other fortune seekers lured by the Sierra Madre ' s signal , forming a chain that eventually grew into teams conscripted to do Elijah ' s bidding or die . Eventually he found a new way of starting the chain in the form of Dog , a nightkin whose overwhelming need for a master figure allowed Elijah to bend him easily to his will . Human nature got the better of these teams though , and as soon as they became close to the treasure they all felt they could take it for themselves , inevitably turning on one another . One team managed to actually get Elijah into the heart of the casino , but after their deaths , Elijah found himself trapped and alone . So he modified the signals controlling the collars to add an extra condition : if one person died , they all would die . Unable to communicate with Dog and the outside , Elijah assumed this would be his end , until Dog , automatically acting on orders given to him long ago , brought to the casino a prisoner with a Pip - Boy 3000 , someone with whom Elijah was capable of communicating . Elijah would be free to go , assuming he could bear to leave behind the casino and all its secrets . He guided the Courier and the three remaining collars of the Sierra Madre : Dog , Christine Royce and Dean Domino . There , he ordered them to trigger the Gala Event to reopen the doors of the Sierra Madre Casino . Once inside , the Courier managed with Elijah ' s instruction to arrive in the Sierra Madre Vault , where Elijah came out of hiding and a confrontation ensued . Inventory . < nowiki > < / nowiki > Appearances . Father Elijah is mentioned in " " , " Old World Blues " , " Lonesome Road " , and appears in the " Dead Money " .