A radio crackles to life in a burnt out bus. Lights flicker on and off, and then a red line switches across.
A soft melody starts playing:
I don't want to set the world on fire...
I just want to start a flame in your heart...
A radio crackles to life in a burnt out bus. Lights flicker on and off, and then a red line switches across.
A soft melody starts playing:
I don't want to set the world on fire...
I just want to start a flame in your heart...
Amy whistles under her breath while she reassembles her pistols. She'd been told over and over that it was overkill to have one in each hand, but she couldn't explain why it felt...right, to have both. Checking her work one more time, flicking the safeties on and off, looking down the sights, she nods, satisfied. She holstered both, swung her pack back on, and walks up to the concealed entrance to Vault 87.
Her (overpaid) informant told her this place was a wealth of Vault-tec leftovers, and in the Wasteland, those were worth more than caps could ever be. Especially to the Brotherhood, and once she had an in with them, well. Thus would begin her revenge.
She plugs her Pip-boy into the receptacle once she was on the other side of the door, keying in the code to open it up. "Vault-tec, your secrets will be mine," she mutters to herself.
Amy unholsters one weapon. Damn it, there wasn't supposed to be anything in here! She was told it was empty!
She switches on the Pip-boy's torch and immediately gags. A man leans against the wall opposite the door, ripped to shreds. Blood is splayed around him. It doesn't look like it was done that long ago...
...which means her contact set her up. Well. Fuck.
Amy keeps heading in, still wanting to get something out of this, but she keeps quiet and cautious.
"Fuck. Fuck!" Amy says under her breath, hoping the coarse language would calm her rocketing heart-rate. Super Mutants. Has to be.
She spies a computer terminal in a barred room close to her. Good. Maybe she can steal some information and have that be it. She's not going toe-to-toe with Super Mutants. She likes being alive, deformed as she is.
She slinks next to the door, tugging a bobby pin from her pocket as she does. She points her light at the keyhole and gets to work. The lock clicks in seconds and Amy steals inside quickly, shutting and locking the door behind her.
Amy knows Centaurs are often just precursors to a Super Mutant attack...but there is nothing else in the room besides the two of them and the creature isn't attacking. Which... is very unusual for a non-sentient creature.
Amy holsters her gun cautiously and keeps her eyes on the Centaur.
"Hey, hey, it's okay. I won't...hurt you. Surprisingly."
Amy isn't sure her raspy voice is actually calming, but she is curious enough about this creature to get closer to figure it out. She keeps one hand up, the other stretching out to it.
"It's okay little... big guy. I'm just gonna come a little closer. Just coming to say hi."
Amy rubs it's head soothingly. Or, at least, she hopes it is.
"There, there, big guy. It's all right. It's all right. Let it out." She catches sight of her own reflection in the darkened window. No skin, no hair, craggy scars stretching over her exposed, hardened muscle. "We're all monsters here."
It takes a while to stop sobbing. When it does, it looks up at Amy like it's assessing her. Then it draws itself to its full height (taller than Amy), and shuffles over to the desk in the room. There, it tries several times to open a drawer, but neither it's feet-hands or mouth-tentacles have any finesse.
The noises it makes become more distressed.
"Hey! Hey, it's okay. I'll get that," Amy says quickly, stepping between it and the drawer.
It steps away, and Amy pulls it open. Inside is a file, a little gore-stained, but still readable. The first page is a file of information, like on any form Amy filled out Before, with a picture of a young man attached. He looks... familiar.
She turns around and holds the picture up next to the Centaur's face.
That's...a little concerning, and makes Amy wonder if there's better treasures to be found further below. But, she thinks as she looks back over her shoulder, she's got something better to take care of right now.
"Let's go, Edward," she whispers, leading the way out of the vault.
"Rake, have a little faith. I know more about destroying walls than these pathetic excuses for soldiers ever will."
Nathlee has her feet up on her desk, mirror in hand, reapplying lipstick. Where she got it is one mystery she will never tell. She snaps the mirror closed when she's done.
"Besides, these walls withstood nuclear fallout. What on earth could they do that hundreds of nukes couldn't?"
Nathlee grins smugly.
"See, I told you. Everything will be fine. The Enclave know when they're beaten." She swings her legs back onto the ground, heading over to her personal armory. "Now, the question is, do we let them scamper off home or do we head out there and show them just the mistake they made?"
Nathlee wakes a day later. Her head is throbbing, and there's a strange tingle to her skin. She struggles to sit, hand cupping the back of her head. Her hair feels...matted. Sticky. Disgusting. A wash is definitely in order. She won't have herself looking anything less than perfect in front of-
Wait. Why is it so quiet? And where is her- She opens her eyes to inspect her left wrist. Her Pip-boy is no longer sitting there. Nathlee snarls. One of those...jackals, they must've taken it while she was knocked out. She'll deal with them slowly.
She struggles to stand, pressing heavily on the cave wall to remain upright, cursing the whole way. How dare they? The Enclave had gone, Nathlee was their victorious saviour, and they turn on her and steal her belongings? She will hunt down every last one of those...creatures, and see them pay. Not the first time she's had to kill a group of raiders. Perhaps the ones that beg her she will allow to live. Maybe missing a few limbs but-
Her thoughts stop as she reaches the main cave section.
She stalks around the room, trying to contain her mounting terror. How? How did this happen? There was nothing that could've broken through the cave wall that Nathlee did not prepare for...that she hadn't chosen this specific cave system for. What could they have possibly used?
Nathlee would run through it on her terminal, but that and her entire desk have been reduced to splinters. Her armoury raided, no doubt by the Enclave, picking at the corpse of her headquarters. Her home. They no doubt took her Pip-Boy too, the bastards. Oh, she will teach them the true meaning of fear, of that she has no doubt.
Nathlee doesn't do afraid. She gets angry. She gets cold. Mean. She's never afraid.
But she cannot deny that the emotion that sends her fleeing to the site of the explosion, out into the dull light of day, to search for the blown apart bomb casing, was something very close to fear.
There's quite a few casings out there, testament to the amount of tries it took to destroy the wall, but lying on top of the pile is a small green remnant. She picks it up, studying it. On the very edge is a small chip of yellow paint. She doesn't need the rest to know what it was.
Mini-nuke.
She stumbles back inside the cave, feet brushing through piles of ash, tripping over bodies, and each time Nathlee holds in a gasp, a scream. Nukes were the Brotherhood's weapons. Nukes were closely guarded...hell, if she'd known there was a supplier out there, she would've taken them all! How did the Enclave get their hands on one? And why use it on her? Either she pissed them off more than she thought possible, or they had a stockpile they didn't mind wasting. Either way, it confirmed for Nathlee that she would track the bastards to their hole and burn them out, one by one if necessary.
She-
Radiation. It was a nuke, and they fired it into a cave, the idiots, and hopefully a few of their own soldiers went down with them.
But that explained the smell, and the tingle on her skin. Why no one who didn't seem too injured wasn't getting back up. It didn't explain why Nathlee wasn't gasping for air, bleeding out of everything and rotting from the inside out. Who survives radiation? Who survives a blow to the back of the head, for that matter. Who-
Nathlee stopped dead in the middle of the cave. Her hands started shaking as she lifted them to eye level. They looked no different, but she knew what they could look like.
What they will look like.
Thek hears the door shatter upstairs. "No! I'm not done!" She whispers to herself.
She analyses the broken synth in front of her. Still so much left to be put back together, and no one around knew how to do it right. She couldn't just...leave him!
The man takes her hand between his skeletal ones. "If you have to run, run. I'll be here when you get back." His half-finished mouth curls into a comforting smile. Thek shakes her head. "Thek, you don't know if you can stop a Courser."
"We'll find out, won't we?" Thek says stubbornly and gets back to reattaching his leg.
Thek peeks out of one eye, then both eyes open hugely. "Oh. Well."
Fredrick laughs, sounding mostly relieved. "Well then!"
Thek doesn't laugh, but she does grin.
"Apparently my super-hacking covers all synths. You'd think the Institute would make sure their secret police were protected," she says.
Thek hops off the table, squinting at the Courser. "Would you mind waiting a few minutes, Fred? I wanna investigate her."
Fredrick waves his hand. "Go right ahead. I'm not going anywhere."
Thek gets a bit closer, wiggling her fingers. It may not actually do anything, but it makes her feel like she's hacking quicker.
"K9-56, huh? Do you think they knew they were giving you a number that sounds like a dog?"
"The fuck is-" is all the lead bandit has time to say before he is picked up and thrown into the wall. The deathclaw grabs the other bandits, ripping them apart, tearing off heads with its teeth.
A few try to escape, running past the creature, but it catches them every time, and blood begins to stain every wall.
She slides off the bed, her dress righting itself as she does, and starts going through the bandit's belongings and corpses. Guns, eh. Ammo, worse, food, whatever.
Caps? Okay, she can keep those. But her real goal-
"AHA! Yessssssss," she hisses victoriously, coming up with several inhalers of Jet. A shake of each proves they're all full. She uncaps one and takes a full breath in. The tingling is slight, she doesn't feel it much, but her brain immediately relaxes and her skin stops feeling so tight. "That's better. Okay. Time to get moving."
She takes the least blood-stained bag and fills it with her new belongings. She swings it on and exits the shack.
"Hmmmm," she says, closing her eyes. She spins on the spot, fingers pointing out. A couple of seconds, and then she stops, and opens her eyes. Empty wasteland stretches out in front of her. "This way."
She threads her thumbs through the straps of her bag, and sets off.
"No...no, fuck!"
Hawke takes another last, desperate look around the room. Clearly a former Institute lab, abandoned when it was clear the Capital wasteland didn't fear them the way they were further up the coast. She'd been raiding them for months, searching them inside and out, tearing them apart for any clue, any sign-
They told her this was it. They'd found him.
She picks up a terminal and throws it against the wall, howling in fury.
Hawke takes several minutes to calm down, and once she is, most of the lab is destroyed. Which, she surmises, is fine. Less chance of the Institute finding anything if they return.
Perhaps she should leave even less.
Half an hour later, she is walking back out into the wasteland, and an explosion rips apart the smelting factory behind her, destroying every last trace of the lab.
"We know. We are trying. We don't want anyone taken against their will, let alone someone with a life."
The woman takes a sip from her glass, pursing her lips afterwards, like the taste was wrong. Not a drinker, then. "We just seem to always be a few steps behind."
The woman takes in a breath. What she's been told to ask will not be easy, and she's more than aware of Hawke's quick temper.
"The thing is, for us to remain hidden, to keep the others in our care safe, we can't recruit. Not without exposing ourselves. But, there are people out there who align with us, and we know they can be trusted. People with contacts in places with information we couldn't get otherwise."
And then the glass in her hand shatters.
She draws a knife, and holds it to the Railroader's neck, her other hand keeps her head still.
"You want me, me, to go back to those soulless fucks, and beg for my position back? You want me to go crawling back on my belly to the people who murdered my sister and sent my brothers far enough away that I cannot reach them?"
She presses the knife into the woman's neck. Blood starts to bead along it. "The same people who would've killed my husband if they'd found out what he was?"
The woman is trembling, her heart thumping. She's never been so scared for her life, but oddly enough it makes her mind clearer.
"Yes. And you know we wouldn't if it wasn't necessary. We're falling too far behind. We don't get new intel from people who can track the Institute, we're sunk. You may as well say goodbye to Anders forever, because we lose his trail, he's gone."