"I could protect you. And the streets aren't always safe either."

Ellie chews her lip as she thinks.

"Okay," she decides. "We'll go with you."

"Excellent."

"I'll take the lead."

"Sure." Ellie stands and approaches closer to the cat/woman.

"Keep under cover when you can," she advises. "Their ammo's going to be the shittiest stuff in their arsenal - and most of 'em will be firing pretty slow. They've got nicer stuff than hunting guns mostly, but that just means they ain't shooting plain lead balls." She heads towards the doors, then - "They'll try to outflank us, use their numbers and positioning to an advantage, and their first instinct's gonna be making us waste bullets - I won't run out of ammo, but I can get tired."

"You'll probably last longer than me."

"Try and save your ammo, then, for when it really counts."

Nod.

Onward into the museum, then?

Yep.

Ellie is just here for moral support, really. Cat and Jade will have to do most of the heavy lifting. Ellie can point a gun and watch the corners.

Jade is possibly also along as moral support, given how Cat leaps up several stories once they're within the auditorium - drawing bursts of gunfire and a lot of curses - cuts through a metal gate with her whip - and then starts drawing surrenders.

Well. Whatever works.

As long as they all drop their guns and don't make any sudden moves.

"I'll keep an eye on them," she says, "If you want to talk to the group we rescued."

"Seems like a fair distribution of labor."

She'll go knock on the door the raiders' victims are holed up behind.

"Who's there?"

"Uh, the people who just kicked those raiders' asses?"

"Who are you aligned with?" There's some faint sounds of motion beyond.

"No one. We were just passing by."

There's some muffled sounds like conversation - and then the door opens, revealing a tiny handful of people with padded armor (more professional, less ragtag than what some of the raiders have) and guns, and a less tiny handful of people in assortedly worn out street clothes, all of them also gripping guns, even the older children - except for the smallest two children, and one weathered-looking woman who might be blind. 

They don't all look very human. The old woman has an oddly flat face, and feathers instead of hair, and one of the armed people is a hard-faced woman whose large yellow eyes glow like lamps in her head, and one of the unarmored-but-armed teenagers has loose pinkish-gray skin and small red eyes with no apparent pupil, and there's tiny signs of strangeness around more of them. (Which... Were possibly echoed in the raiders as well, though Ellie didn't get a good look.) Their leader looks the most put together - the most undoubtedly human - and steps forward to greet Ellie.

"We apologize for the suspicious welcome," he says, his laser rifle still in his hands and ready, a knife firmly affixed to the end of it. "Thank you for helping us out."

"It's... fine. I can understand why you'd be suspicious of strangers."

"There's not a lot of people interested in helping each other out, normally. At least not strangers."

"I guess I'm a little out of touch with how things go around here."

"Grew up in a vault?"

"...Not exactly. When I woke up this morning it was October twenty-third. Twenty-seventy-seven."

Low whistle. "That's the day the War started."