Author's Foreword
I have always had a lot of trouble with the endings for Fallout: New Vegas, and this is essentially a continuation of the Independent ending. I would do a Mr. House ending, because I think he would make a better leader than anything that I could be (or my character I should say, since this isn't a self-insert, my character just thinks similarly to me (for obvious reasons, such as the fact that I am writing her character)), but I love the Brotherhood of Steel way to much for that (even the ones that are jerks, like the Outcasts, or most of the Mojave chapter).
I have never played any Fallout game other than Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas (and all of their DLC's (except of course for Lonesome Road, HURRY UP BETHESDA)) but I have a passing familiarity with the entire franchise due to an excessive amount of reading of the Fallout Vault Wikia page. I will focus on events from the beginning of Project Purity to the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, and this story will focus primarily on the events after the establishment of an Independent Mojave.
Also, the Lone Wanderer will be showing up, but not for a LONG time, so hopefully I will be able to keep this going. However, I only have the next few chapters planned out and will eventually be stuck until I can get and finish Lonesome Road. Chapter generation will also be slowed down by the appearance of college.
On a side note, my other stories are currently on hiatus. I am simply not in a Fire Emblem mood right now, and when I was, I could not write anything due to the fact that my old computer hated me. That and I only got this really old version of Word about a week and a half ago. This is just for the few people that like both Fallout and Fire Emblem and may have read and maybe even liked my stories about Fire Emblem.
Also, I am really bad at naming people, places, and things, so even the chapter names will be horrible. I apologize for my lack of creative thinking.
I am very happy to receive criticism (both constructive and not) and am willing to listen to pretty much anything you may have to say about this story. If anything is ever wrong, PLEASE, feel free to tell me so in a review, and I will fix it as soon as I can. I don't care if it is a typo, poor sentence fluency, misplaced information, grammatical issues, redundancy of sentences (I went to the I went to the...), or whatever. I am posting these as rough drafts that can be edited by people who are not familiar with my writing style (such as it is).
Yes I like parentheses, sue me.
Prologue; Wrong Traveler
"And there goes another filthy rich caravan," muttered Nabrun to his raider gang. The little group of vicious killers was located near a bend in the road just west of Nipton. Normally, it would have been an excellent ambush spot, with the raiders holding the high ground and able to quickly surround any caravans or travelers. However, the presence of two of those newly upgraded Securitrons had deterred any chance of being able to take out the group of three brahmin and half dozen traders and regular guards.
Nabrun was having a bad day. Really it had been a bad week. Or a bad month. Pickings had been scarce in the Mojave since the second battle of Hoover Dam, and the number of stray, unprotected caravans or travelers had decreased so much that they were practically non existent. Most of the caravans in the Mojave had taken to keeping the new and improved Securitrons on for guard duty ever since that Courier had sprung from nowhere to take the entire Mojave by storm. She had essentially created a new nation almost overnight and it had been an instant superpower. No one knew that there had been so many Securitrons at her disposal, only a few hundred had ever been seen on the Strip or wandering the wastes before, and the sudden arrival of thousands of the robots had been an astonishing surprise for everyone in the wastes.
And it was not revealed until the second battle of Hoover Dam and her nearly single handed defeat of the Legion. Her arrival with her army, and her personal execution of the Legate and newly crowned Caesar II had shocked the remnants of the former southwestern United States. Then she had turned around and convinced (by way of her Securitrons ) the awed NCR troops to run back to Republic with their tails between their legs. Most of the regular troopers and a good sized percentage of the officers had been happy to just go home to their families. Many of them had also had personal experience with the Courier, and had been helped or saved by her, and she had become a popular figure among the NCR's people. In fact, that popularity was caused largely by the NCR's huge propaganda machine, which was trying to encourage enlistment and to motivate the troops already fighting. The NCR military had been expecting her to aid in the defense of the dam, and had initially been pleasantly surprised by the arrival of three hundred Securitrons, Brotherhood of Steel Paladins, Boomer artillery support, and air support from the Boomers ancient B-29 bomber and an advanced ex-Enclave vertibird.
What they had not been expecting was to be forced to abandon the Mojave and sign a "peace treaty" that recognized the nation of New Vegas as an independent country.
The first few days after the battle had been a nightmare for any raider gangs in the Mojave, as thousands of NCR troopers marched back to the Mojave Outpost, shooting at any geckos, radscorpians, coyotes, or raiders that ventured anywhere near any of the roads. However, things had only gotten worse as hundreds of trigger-happy mono-wheeled robots began trundling throughout the entire desert. Nabrun didn't know how many other raider gangs had been wiped out, but he knew that he and his little group of six had been lucky so far, as they had hidden in an old cave a little bit north of Nipton that had gone unnoticed by the roving robots.
Even after the hordes of robots had rolled all across the desert to who-knows-and-who-cares-where, the new caravan company of the, "Confederation of New Vegas", the Mojave Trading Company (MTC), had started moving along the roads. And they had Securitrons guarding them, as well as the usual mercenaries and armed traders. Nabrun hadn't been anywhere near the Dam when the (very brief) battle had broken out, but fighting had taken place over most of the Mojave, and he had seen a group of five Securitrons release a barrage of missiles at a large patrol of thirty Legion soldiers about halfway between Nipton and Novac, and he hadn't seen much left of the Legionariesbut an unnatural rain of body parts.
He had taken one look at the red mist swirling around with clouds of dust and other... debris and decided to not make the same mistake, and told his gang to stay out of sight whenever they saw one of those wandering death machines. Unfortunately for the raiders, that only left the other big caravans, such as the Crimson Caravan Company and the Gun Runners, as most of the other small caravans in the area had been driven out of business or destroyed in the months leading up to the renewed confrontation on the Colorado River. However, those caravans had been the ones to stay away from before, as they were normally heavily guarded by mercenaries. The few remaining raider gangs in the area had been forced to take on the much tougher caravans, and more and more raiders had been killed.
Nabrun wasn't educated by and stretch of the imagination, but he wasn't stupid either. He knew that the time of the raider was over in the Mojave, and he would either need to get a respectable job (fat chance) or move his gang out of the Mojave. To prepare for his mad rush to head south, where hopefully he could find some weak tribals to enslave, or a small village to take over, he began marching his gang south to Nipton, staying nearby the road in the hope of finding an unguarded caravan to take over and use the pack brahmin to carry their excess equipment and various "things", ranging from trophies taken from people they had killed, to bits of armor to repair their already haphazard attire. They had had little luck so far in the slow, dangerousmarch to the new border south of Nipton, and had only barely been able to keep feeding themselves by killing the mutated animals in their way.
And now another caravan had walked right by them, completely unaware that his gang had even been there.
He sighed and watched the last Securitrons move around the bend and slowly stood up and looked up and down the road to see if anymore were coming. Seeing no one coming, he waved to his gang and started walking down the hillside to the road. They only needed to skirt around the ruins of Nipton now, and then turn south at the old Mojave drive in and they were free from the hordes of robots and that unstoppable Courier that had killed even House.
He looked at his group, and considered himself lucky that he hadn't lost anyone to the hordes of armies that seemed bent on killing all raiders across the Mojave. Virch, his friend since he didn't even know when; Wyla, Virch's lover with her beautiful red hair blending into the desert background; Ax, the crazy guy he had picked up back over by Nelson rolling mindlessly in the blood of dozen NCR soldiers he had killed with a medieval battle axe from some sort of museum; Drew, the closest thing his group had to a medic; Syla, a young, drug crazed girl formerly of the Fiends; and Aarhus, who creeped him out, although he would never admit it.
The group got along fine, albeit a little dysfunctionaly, and would probably do well if they could find some little village or raiding base to join or take over.
Suddenly, up ahead, he saw someone walking along the road.
"Hey, get down get down!" he said quickly to his group. The last few weeks of hiding from rolling super robots had done wonders for the groups willingness to take his orders unquestionably (at least when they weren't in any immediate danger) and their reflexes had improved markedly. The raiders all dove quickly behind an old burned out car and some debris from a landslide along the side of the ravine that the road wound its way through. He nodded to Drew who pulled his sniper rifle from his back and propped it up on the remnants of the passenger side windowsill.
"What do you see?" Nabrun asked in a hiss, his lips nearly salivating with the hope that they might be able to at least take a traveler or two and their gear. Maybe even have whoever it was carry some of their stuff for them.
"Hang on, hang on. Um, its just one person, and... I think its a girl. Yep, I see boobs, definitely a girl. Looks like she's got just a pistol, and maybe, er, wow, that is one shiny rifle. Can I have that rifle she's got Nab? It is a beaut!"
"Yeah, yeah, whatever, Drew. Does she look tough?" Nabrun asked excitedly. He hadn't had a woman in almost two months, and he wanted to take this girl alive. He would let the others, minus Virch and Wyla, have a go at her too but only after he was done. But only if she didn't look tough. That crazy Courier's rise to power had been unprecedented and had proven to him that the Legions view of women was probably the stupidest in the universe. And she had proven it for sure when she fought Lanius sword to sword. And filleted his dick with her flaming blade.
All of the stories told about her described her as some sort of giant goddess of warfare, with guns bristling all over her person. She was said to be a giant, something around seven feet tall. Nabrun had assumed that that was just embellishing, as nobody topped six and a half feet since the great war. Lack of food and water, and an excess of radiation had stunted the growth of humans (except for Super Mutants of course, but they were infected by F.E.V. which was different in any case) and very few people even went much over six feet now.
"Naw, she looks like nothin', maybe five four or somethin'. Wow she is hot, can I nail her boss? After you of course,"
"Yeah sure, just get down. Wait until she walks through, and jump her on my signal,"
The raiders hunkered down behind the rocks and the car, taking care that they didn't show any part of their bodies to the lone traveler. After a minute or so, Nabrun heard the crunching of gravel as she clambered over another landslide just a few yards down the road from the raider gang. He nodded to his compatriots, signaling them to move the instant he did. He had an old lead pipe clutched in his right hand and a revolver in his left. If everything went well he should get the jump on her with the pipe and bring her to the ground before she could pull a weapon on him. And even if she did, he had the revolver. He wanted this girl alive, but he would settle with her dead if it meant that he wasn't dead. He heard her footsteps coming as she stepped past the old car and continued walking up the road. For the first time he saw the, "shiny rifle" on her back, and realized that it was actually a customized sniper rifle that had grown infamous across the entire Mojave as the bringer of death to anyone who opposed its owner.
It was the Courier's Gobi Campaign Sniper Rifle.
His eyes widened as he realized that the girl in front of him, wearing typical merc' gear, was the actually the newly crowned Queen of the Confederacy of New Vegas. And probably the deadliest living thing west of the Colorado.
She was the Conqueror of the Sierra Madre, the Terror of the Legion, the Nightmare of Deathclaws.
He was just your average raider gang leader.
In a word, his entire group was screwed six different ways.
He, very slowly, began to get up to move around the car and hide on the other side until the warrior demi-goddess had gone on her merry way, when he realized that moving was probably the stupidest thing he could have done. And the worst mistake of his life.
His gang, not realizing who they were about to ambush, all jumped at her as soon as they saw him twitch. Six heavily armed raiders all jumped the lone, unawares girl with blood curdling yells. He didn't even see her move. A rapid series of six bangs leaped out of the barrel of the golden rifle that had suddenly appeared in her hands and was suddenly facing back the way she came.
Six bodies of people who had been his friends fell to the ground around the Courier, each with a single .308 bullet transfixed into their skulls.
He hadn't even moved past the front of the ancient car when he was brought to the ground by immensely powerful hands, and he felt his face smash against the cracked pavement. Blood spluttered out of his mouth as he tried to get away, crawling with the strength of terror pounding through his veins as he lashed out against the woman on his back, squeaks slipping from his throat as he tried to crawl away. Suddenly, he felt a pain hit him just below his kidney and smash him against the bumper of the car that he hadn't quite gotten away from. He looked up and saw a nine millimeter pistol barrel less than two feet from his face and an almost incredulousgrin on the face of the beautiful woman that was about to become his killer. She had a pretty, heart shaped face with full lips that were curled upward in a predator's grin. Her face was nearly perfect honestly, except for a vicious looking trio of scars that ran down her face. The sort of scars that one got after going toe to claw with a Deathclaw or Yau Gaoi, and actually survived the experience.
She ran a hand through her slightly disheveled neck length blonde hair and shook her head, keeping the gun aiming right in between his eyes.
"Did you honestly think I didn't see you coming down the road? Really?" her voice was a melodious tenor, and seemed completely at odds with the laughing but cold green eyes that stared right at his bleeding corpse.
"You know, I've been in your situation before myself. I even took a bullet to the head like you're going to. The one difference is, you won't be getting up,"
The sun was bright over head, and highlighted her wonderous face. The breeze, a constant in the desert wasteland, stirred the blood and sweat on his face as he weakly held up a hand to stop a bullet that would pass through his eyeball and into his brain like it was wet paper. He feebly opened his mouth to surrender when-
A loud bang claimed all he knew.