"What the hell are you doing?" She shouted as she rolled off of her mattress and slammed down onto the hard concrete floor of the cafe. She looked at a Nuka-Cola brand clock ticking away in a corner of the ceiling, then turned back to Amber. "It's not even time for my shift yet! And what the hell are you aiming at with that stupid ri-" She was cut off by a second scream from the doorway that lead to the second story of the building. At that she scrambled over to where her old rusted laser rifle lay, snatching it up and aiming it towards the doorway where light from the small lamp we'd rigged up made shadows dance to an ungodly rhythm, seeming to twist and writhe on the ground of the doorway.
Hurray for Ghost towns.
"So what do we do now?" I asked, my eyes never leaving the doorway.
"What the hell are you asking me for!" Sienna shouted back in retort. "I'm a member of the Enclave not the Van Helsings! I already told you I don't believe in ghosts!"
From the peripherals of my vision, I could see Amber raise an eyebrow. "For somebody who doesn't believe in ghosts, you're sure quick to blame this on one."
I gritted my teeth. Possible supernatural screams were sporadically issuing through a doorway that may or may not lead directly to the cold depths of hell, and they were poking fun at each other. Naturally. "Okay! Regardless of ghosty properties or not, what the hell are we going to do now?"
"Keep your weapons on that doorway." Sienna said as she moved behind me, towards the door. There was the noise of her shaking and hitting the door that we'd boarded up. There was a loud crash and the sound of shattering glass, followed by a strange 'Whoooooorp' sound. She returned to her position after she fired a couple of shots at it. "Well, I don't want to freak you guys out, but I'm pretty sure we're trapped in here. I threw a trashcan against one of the windows that was partially unboarded, and it didn't break. It just cracked then somehow resealed itself." She took half a second to pull her helmet off the ground and put it on, and then pressed a small black indention on the side of it. "My EFS isn't picking anything up. What about yours?"
I'd totally forgotten about the EFS. I'd turned it off yesterday when it kept telling be about all of the radroaches that were swarming around in the grass, filling my vision with red. Now I turned it on again, and there was only one tick mark to be seen... directly in front of me. Shit. I shifted to the left and right to try and triangulate its position. It was only 3 meters ahead of me. Double Shit. There was a sound of a glass bottle being knocked around on the floor as Amber started moving towards the door.
"There's only one hostile, and I think it's upstairs." She said calmly. Her brown combat armor was silent as she moved forwards, the only sounds were her feet crushing bits of glass as she moved. I was suddenly glad for the thick boots of my Vault suit.
"How far can your EFS pick up hostiles?" Sienna asked, her voice distorted by her Enclave helmet, as she started to move forwards too.
"Thirty feet." Amber responded. She'd reached the doorway, and had her back against the wall as she began to peer around the black corner. She pulled her head back and slipped on her Security Combat armor helmet, then tapped the side, causing the eyes of the helmet to glow a bright red. Night vision, I guessed. Seriously, I want a cool helmet and armor too.
"Mine's fifteen. That means it's on the third story. Meet you there." Suddenly they both dashed through the doorway and started running up the stairs as a third scream ripped its way through the night. I scrambled after them, clutching my bat in one hand and fishing the pistol out of my rucksack with the other. I might not know how to use it, but I'd be damned if I ran in there to fight a screaming monster thingie without some firepower. I slipped the pistol into my jury rigged holster and gripped the bat with both hands as I ran up the stairs. I caught up to my companions as I ran up the stairs. Apparently even though the armor they were wearing was badass, it was still heavy and it slowed them down. I was the first thought the third story's stairwell doorway, and the first to see the monstrosity that awaited us there.
Attached to the ceiling was a little girl. Or I should say half of a little girl. Her lower half had been removed and her upper half was now attached to a spider-like machine that crawled along the ceiling, gears and pistons clicked and smashed together all over it, small arms armed with blades and chainsaws spun and twisted together, it's metal was silver white, and it gleamed in the light of my Pipboy's flashlight feature. Unfortunately for me, even as the Pipboy s light allowed me to see what I was facing, it let the mecha-monster see me too. I leapt out of the doorway with only an instant to spare as a bright white light flashed out of the little girls mouth and hit the doorway, causing it to crumble. Great. Now I was trapped in here with a mecha-monster. Alone. I pulled my little possibly nine millimeter pistol from my pocket and started to unload it into the machine. I pulled the trigger and the percussion that followed was deafening, the bullet ripped it's way through one of the monster's many legs and through the wall behind it, nothing stood in that bullets way. What the hell. I glanced towards my Pipboy screen and mentally made it flash to my equipment menu, where I saw a bright green solid box next to a weapon it labeled: The Terror of Vault 48. How did it know what to call it? Hell, how did it know that I had it? Freaking Pipboy magic.
I barely twisted to the right as my entire left side began to burn with pain. The Monster hand fired it's light cannon at me again, striking a few feet to my left, but the heat that it produced was more than enough to singe all of my exposed skin on my lower left side, which, thanks to my Pipboy and Vault suit, was kept to a mercifully low total of my fingers and a bit of exposed wrist. I fell to the floor and rolled, swinging the Terror of Vault 48 up to point at the monster that lay now directly in my sights.
!
It was dead after the third shot, which ripped its way through the center of the mechanical monster, tearing out several important looking components, but I kept firing until I'd emptied the clip. It hung onto the ceiling for a few more seconds, but then fell to the floor with a sickening crunch, landing on top of the half body of the little girl. As blood pooled around it, and her organs began to spill out onto the floor, it was my turn to throw up.
I'd finished emptying my stomach into a trashcan as Amber and Sienna burst through the rubble filled doorway. They both froze at the sight of the mechanical demon lying on the body of a little girl. Amber joined me at the trashcan, and Sienna just shook her head at it.
"What happened?" Sienna asked, getting straight to the point.
"The monster... was attached to the little girl. She didn't look alive," Was that really all I'd based it on before I opened fire and put her body in the way of harm? "And it fired beams of light from her mouth, so I unloaded into it with little Terror here." I wagged the pistol in the air. She turned back to the monstrosity and then back to my pistol.
"That, did that?" She asked in disbelief, then shrugged when I nodded. "That's a Life Support Unit. Model B2 if I'm remembering right. It was supposed to keep people who had been dismembered alive until they could be fixed up properly." She shuddered, a weird thing to see since she was wearing her full demonic power armor. "I guess this thing stopped waiting for people to be dismembered and did it itself."
There was a moan from a doorway across from us, directly behind the monster. I spun towards it and pulled out my bat, half expecting another monster. Only then did I realize that my EFS was reading friendlies behind the door. I walked towards in even as Sienna held her laser rifle steady, barrel never leaving that door. I tried to open it, but it was locked, so I got to work trying to pick it with my tools. It only took me a few minutes to understand that it was above my knowledge, so I did the sensible thing, and kicked the door open. Behind it lay a scene nearly as disgusting as the monster that had guarded it.
In one corner of the room there was a pile of dismembered bodies and body parts. There was blood everywhere, pooling around body parts like small lakes. In the opposite corner there were about twenty people shoved together, packed into a cage like cattle. A few looked like they were already dead, held up only by the others in the cage with them. I ran to the cage's door and wasted no time trying to pick it, instead smashing the lock off with my bat and throwing open the door.
To my surprise, the dead looking ones were a lot more energetic than the others.
Ghouls. People that have been rotted inside and out by radiation, and yet strung together by it in a way that makes them nearly impervious to age, makes them immune to radiation, sometimes even stronger in it's presence. Some still retain their normal selves, but all the more likely, they tend to lose themselves and become nothing more than vessels for their most primal instincts: to kill and consume.
At least that's how Ghoulie George the Godteller told it. Ghoulie said he'd been a preacher before the war, and his name was George, but he liked the way they three G's came together with the new name he'd given himself. He'd been alive since before the great war, and had been in the settlement of Scrappington since it had been founded nearly a hundred years ago. And he explained how the town had fallen into the predicament that I'd saved them from.
"See, we were in a right heap o' trouble when ya got us out of there. Doc Honeydew had gotten the entire town up there, saying that he'd witnessed a miracle, that he'd got his old medical bot up and running again. Unfortunately, it decided it didn't want to help us, it decided it wanted to 'Fix' us. So we got locked up in that cage, and it had been pulling one or two of us out a day before you got there, and choppin' us up." Ghoulie George patted me on the back. He was a pretty nice guy when you got past his rotting flesh and all. Which Amber and Sienna hadn't. Sienna just rolled her eyes at me and called me a ghoul hugger and Amber had payed another visit to Doctor Trashcan. As she was, she was munching on some two hundred year old snack cakes, trying her best not to look at the rotting corpse I was talking too.
"And that's why," Ghoulie George said with a sigh, "The town has decided to give ya a reward, of two hundred caps." He spat at a nearby bush. "O' course I'm the only one who put anything inta the 'Emergency Fund' so it's really like I'm giving you it myself." He turned back to me and gave me... what I could only take to be a earnest grin. "Not that ya don't deserve it. Mighty fine work ya did in there." As he said this he passed a bag full of bottlecaps into my hands. Awesome. He started chuckling (Though with his raspy ghoul voice it took me a bit to realize that he wasn't growling.) as he saw my reaction to the sack of caps.
"I forget ya'll 're new to the wastes. Out here we tend ta use old bottlecaps for moneys, or we just barter." Huh.
"Why would you use bottlecaps?" I inquired of the elderly ghoul preacher.
He chuckled a bit more before answering, scratching his head with a scarcely fleshed finger. "I've been through a lot since the bombs fell, fighting for myself, preachin' my message throughout the wastes, but I don't think I've ever asked myself that. One day I just saw people usin' caps, and it just worked, I guess." I shrugged and laughed along, and slipped the bag into my rucksack, packing it underneath a few clips of spare ammunition I'd found searching the upper levels of the cafe. I'd felt weird after seeing all of the people we'd saved go back to their normal lives; it felt like stealing. But hell, they didn't complain so I didn't either.
I'd taken to wearing Terror in my holster on my custom made armor, smiling at how comfortable it was, even though it was more than a few pounds heavier. After getting the townsfolk out of that cage, they'd pretty much done everything they could to help us out; which was how I'd got my newish armor. A old woman by the name of Beatrice the Wicked had offered to fix up my armor, and the results KICKED ASS. Most of my custom modifications had been removed, replaced by much cooler solid iron and steel platings, with lots of leather and wool padding in between. My new holster was a actual leather holster, which had been sowed into the Vault suit itself. The giant '48' still ran across the back though. Might as well as told her to take it off, but whatever.
After I shot that deranged robotic monstrosity, and we'd gotten the people out of that cage, we'd all headed downstairs to try to find out how to unseal the doors and windows, only to be informed that they'd unlocked the second the robot lost control of the building. It's scary how much control those pre-war scientists were willing to give these machines. The towns people had shacked us up in the local inn (Still no blankets.), and we'd gone right to sleep. Well, me and Amber had gone right to sleep. Sienna had decided to get into a drinking battle with a few of the local ghouls, and was still sleeping off her hangover. We kicked Sienna awake around eleven, then packed up, refilled out supplies, and headed out, waving farewell to our new friends.
I still didn't know why I was leaving. The new Mayor had offered us housing and hinted that there were jobs aplenty that would need filling, (With all of the people who'd been ripped apart by that machine, I didn't doubt him.) but Amber had been adamant that we leave the town, and get on with our 'Quest' to reach New Houston, and try to raise the city. She'd been talking to some of the locals, and after learning that none of them knew about New Houston s safety feature, had gained a even stronger desire to liberate New Houston from it's underground prison. Still, for some reason I felt like I should stick with her, so I did. Sienna came too, though she might have stayed if her judgment hadn't been so impaired by a massive headache and partial dehydration.
But all the same, we started off towards New Houston again, packs a bit heavier, and my armor a bit more badass.
Walking is boring. I'd gotten a sneak preview on the march from the Vault to Scrappington, but yesterday I was still in a a state of constant awe of the sky and the colors. But that was yesterday, and today was boring. We walked past burned down houses and forgotten gas stations, followed by the ever present golden green grasses that shifted besides us, blowing gracefully in the wind. I tried to start up a conversation with Amber, but all she'd talk about was guns. I mean, that's great and all, but it gets pretty dry after an hour and a half. So I went to the next person in my party, Sienna. The conversation I started lasted about five seconds, and went like this:
"Hey, so what's life like in the Enclave?"
"Your face."
Yeah. I didn't know what to make of that, so I chalked it up to her saying that I was good looking, and military life was much the same. Freaking Texans.
And so, I was left to talk to myself. That conversation was even worse:
-Why did we leave the Vault?-
-'Cause shut up.-
Man, I can be a prick. But it got me thinking. Why had I left the Vault? For the life of me I couldn't think of a reason, aside from, 'Because she's pretty and talked to me like a person'. In four hours, I'd gone from kickin' it easy in my vault to beating brains out in the wastes. I didn't regret it though. I mean, I had everything I could have ever wanted, and I traded it all away, for a taste of Adventure, which mostly involved me killing shit. Still, I couldn't bring myself to say that I wouldn't make the same choices again. Freaking Texans.
The sun was seemed to waver endlessly at its peak, perpetually at its hottest, and the storm that had passed through had made it so humid it we were practically swimming through the air. I tried to count the clouds but I got a head ache. Eventually I wound up just playing with the toggles on my Pipboy, exploring all of it's features, both old and new. I discovered some cool stuff, like a chart that actively displays my physical condition, including how close limbs are to breaking, and how far away I was from dying of dehydration, and I found another section that kept track of... stuff? It had tags like 'Quests Completed' and 'Creatures killed' (Both of which had a small one displayed promptly besides them.), but also stuff like 'Challenges Completed' and 'Bugs Squashed'. How it would know stuff like this escaped me. As I flicked through the menus, I my eyes fell back across the radio tab, where they pointed out to me that there was another broadcast available. It read, 'Enclave B9-A113 Distress Signal'. Great. More distress was all we needed. I flipped it on anyways, and was immediately assaulted by static so loud I missed my Pipboy twice before slapping it off of the frequency. Amber shot me a glare. I don't think she'd even noticed I'd stopped listening to her gun speech until now.
"I see you got that signal too?" Sierra said through her helmet's voice filter as she caught up to me with a few extra steps. "I got it about an hour ago, but it's just static. Happens all the times with all of the shitty reception out here." She gestured to a pair of crumbling metal towers off to the north.
I glanced north, and saw the metal towers, but shook my head. "I don't think that the signal is coming from anything like that. Those towers were probably out of date before atomic cars hit the streets, I doubt I could synch my Pipboy with them if I tried. No, this signal's too strong and clear to be coming out of one of those towers."
I saw genuine surprise in her eyes as she looked towards the towers again. Or at least I assumed it was surprise. Hard to tell behind a half inch of tinted yellow visor. "Then what do you think it was?"
"Did you catch the name?" I asked, and then held up my Pipboy to her so she could read it off when she shook her head. "It's an emergency frequency, probably only able to be decrypted by Enclave units only. Or special officers radios." I added the last part as she pointed to her Enclave helmet.
She shrugged. "Now that I think about it... most officers do have radios attached to their waists. To big to be the same type of model that's in our helmets." She stopped where she stood, then spun to look at me. "If that was a Enclave distress signal, we need to go help!"
I caught the urgency in her voice, even through her helmet's voice filter. "Okay, I'll try to decrypt it. Give me a few seconds." Sierra unslung her laser rifle as I fiddled with the buttons of my Pipboy, looking for a 'decrypt' button. It only took me a few seconds to find, but I had to dig a sensor model out of my packs to get it working properly. Meanwhile Amber had realized we were no longer following behind her and turned around and marched back to where we stood.
"What's going on?" She asked, eyeing Sierra's laser rifle.
"Someone's in trouble." I answered, watching as the decryption meter on my Pipboy slowly rose to one hundred percent. The Broadcast immediately began playing.
"-enty of them. We're without food, and I don't think we'll be getting any any time soon. Those... things seem perfectly happy to just wait as we all rot to death. They seem to be defined just perfectly to take us down. Ha, the only one of us who stood a chance was busy using the head. 2nd Lieutenant Ermical was the only one of us who might have been able to fight back. Fuck. I don't think any of us are making it out of here alive. Or dead. either way, we're not getting out of here except in those things stomachs. What a pain in the ass... Oh well. I guess I always wanted to die here of all places, it's got a nice ring to it. This is Private Dan Karric, signing off. God bless the Enclave." MESSAGE REPEATS "This is Private Dan Kerric, of squad thirty three six dee four of the American Enclave. We've been trapped on Hero's Hill by a swarm of monstrous bugs. Half of my squad's been wiped out, just paralyzed to await death by dehydration or being eaten alive. They chew right through metal. We're in between a burger joint and the memorial, and there must be at least twenty of them."
The message repeated itself.
"You've got to be kidding me! The 'People' in danger are Enclave!" Amber shouted as me and Sierra started towards the new marker on my map, 'Hero's Hill'. "A whole squad of armored badasses like you got their asses whooped, and you're both still going to go try to help them! If Enclave didn't stand a chance against them, what use are we going to be?"
I shrugged as I pulled my bat out of its sling on my backpack. "People need us." I said as I smiled back to her. She was right though. This was crazy. What was I doing? Freaking Texan morals.
Sierra spun around on her metal heels to face Amber. "Listen. It's my people who are stuck up there, not yours. If you don't want to come along, you're welcome to wait here." She then turned around and continued marching towards Hero's Hill. Amber looked at me hopefully. I could only shrug again.
"People need us Amber. I'm going to help." I gave her another wry grin. "We're Americans; we're supposed to help the unfortunate, right?" I marched on after Sierra. I heard her sigh.
"Well, at least I'll finally get a chance to shoot something I can kill. Maybe." She said begrudgingly as she jogged to catch up with us, slipping her helmet over her head.
It took us maybe a half hour to reach the base of Hero's Hill. The Hill itself wasn't all that large, probably smaller than the hill our Vault was built into, but in the miles of flatland that surrounded it, it stuck out. At the top, there was a large bronze statue of two men, dashing towards their enemies valiantly, frozen machine guns firing in their hands. A memorial for the Brazilian Inquisition, I guessed by their metallic Uniforms. The three of us were hiding behind a burned out nuclear powered car, hiding from a creature that none of us could have even imagined.
A big, shiny, silver fly. Sierra called them bloatflies when we first saw them, but my Pipboy registered them as Teslawasps. Regardless, we didn't take any chances. From our car, we could see fifteen of them, all buzzing about rather innocently for a species that was reported to have murdered a squadron of Enclave soldiers.
Well, innocently enough until one of the many streetlights that littered the streets flickered on, and was immediately set upon by every single one of the foot long insects, the other five swarmed out of a nearby building, all of them slashing and hacking at the lamp with razor sharp jaws. It took me a few minutes to realize they weren't just slashing at it, but EATING it. They very quickly devoured part of the steel casing and started biting and chewing at the internal wiring, feasting on the flow of electricity. I now saw how a bunch of Enclave soldiers in their semi-nuclear electrical suits would be a tasty meal for the Teslawasps. The same type of suit that Sierra was crouching directly next to me in. Shit. A quick look up and down the street leading up the hill showed me that they must had been eating all of the streetlamps one by one as they lit up. All of them had been eaten their empty metal carcasses laying everywhere, with the exception of one directly above us, and the one almost at the top of the hill, that they were feasting on. Suddenly the lamp above us sparked and sputtered to life, throwing a bit of extra light down on us. Double shit.
"We've got to get out of here." I whispered, grabbing Amber's shoulder and starting to sneak towards the abandoned burger joint half way up the hill, trying to keep abandoned vehicles between us and the monster bugs. Just as we all made it through the door of the 'Burger Bob's Grill and Bar', the lamp they'd been swarming collapsed and shut off, and they made a bee line for the light where we'd just been. I shut the door and let out a sigh. We were out of danger, if just for a second.
"So what are we supposed to do?" Sierra asked. "They ATE a streetlamp! How are we supposed to stand up to that?"
"Hello? Guns?" Amber waver her gun in the air as she checked and reinserted a magazine.
"You don't think that squad had weapons?" She facepalmed, metal clacking on metal as her glove slapped her armored forehead.
"No, I know they had weapons, but there's something else I know." She put her rifle down on the table she leaned against. "All of you Enclave have laser weapons, right? That's what you said, isn't it?"
Sierra crossed her arms, and (I imagined) frowned behind her helmet. "I might have said something like that, but so?"
"All those things out there are reflective. They're all shiny and silvery and metallic. I don't think Energy Weapons would have done shit to them."
Oooooooh. So that was where that was going. Okay. "So you're plan is just to shoot the living shit out of them?" I asked.
She shrugged. "It's worked before, hasn't it?"
"Uh, that's only worked for me a third of the times I've fought something. Though to be fair the others involve silverware and sports equipment. Do you really think we can take these things?"
she lifted her rifle back up and held it in a menacing manner. "If you can get me onto the roof of this building, I think I can take all of them down before they get to the door. They don't seem to be able to fly much higher then six or seven feet, so I don't think being exposed on the roof will be a problem."
"Do we have a backup plan?" Sierra asked, breaking her silence.
Amber looked to me. "You still have you're bat, right?"
Plan B sucks.
For the most part, it involved me standing just inside the door with my bat, with Sierra next to me with a lead pipe she'd found in the kitchen, ready to smack any of those wasps down if they decided to gnaw through the door. Still better than no plan though.
I knew plan A had started when I heard rounds starting to fire off on the roof. I stood stock still, Hoping she could get them all before they got to the door. I counted the shots... One... Two... Four... Ten... Fourteen... The bullets stopped. That meant that either she'd gotten nearly half of them with one bullet to two beasties, or they were to close to fire. I just hoped for the first one. Naturally my hopes were shattered, along with a pane of glass behind me as one of the creatures burst in through a window. Of course they would go for a window! Windows aren't invincible! I spun to start swinging at the Tesla wasp, but Sierra got to it first and slashed at it. It bumbled just to the right of the blow, and shot a barb from it's stinger as Sierra's momentum carried her past it. Now a barb like that wouldn't normally have done anything, but something was off about this one.
As the barb hit her abdomen, blue sparks arched all around her, the air smelling instantly of ozone as she crumpled to the floor. Well, now that was two reasons why these things could take out fully armored Enclave soldiers; their weapons did nothing to them, and the creatures had tiny EMP blasters on their arses. I brought my bat down on the Wasps head seconds later, cracking it's head's exoskeleton and sending the corpse spinning to the floor.
I started to run towards my downed friend, but two more Teslawasps flew in through the broken window. I slashed at one with a sideways swing and clipped its side, sending it flailing into the wall to my left, struggling to stay airborne. The second shot one of its barbs at me, and it struck me just above my left shoulder, sending electricity arching all about me. The pain was blinding, sending my vision into the red for half a second as the creature came in for the kill. Unfortunately for it, the electricity that exploded out from the barb wasn't nearly as debilitating for me as it was for Sierra, and I swung my bat in an upwards arc with my good arm, crushing it's mandibles and launching it into the ceiling where it hit with a sickening splatter, then fell to the ground. I dashed towards Sierra and started to shake her. Please don't let that have killed my friend. Friend? I'd only known her for, like, a day. Barely. I guest the wastelands do bring out the best in some of us.
"Stop shaking me!" Her muffled voice came through her helmet, the normal electronic sound was absent though. Relief flooded through me. Her voice must have been fried along with the rest of the electronics in her suit when that burst of electricity hit her. "I only heard fourteen shots, and I think you just killed two, so stay focused until you've killed the other four."
I gritted my teeth and looked back to the broken window; where another pair of wasps flew in right on cue. This pair was easy. I slapped one out of the air with my bat, sending bits of insect everywhere and spun to the side as I saw the other was about to release another barb. A quick blow to the head ended it's troubling behavior. I turned back to Sierra for a second to see if any of the barbs had hit her.
Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my neck, and smelled the ozone as electricity arched forth from a small chitin barb. Shit. I collapsed to the floor. Apparently even if I could still fight with taking one in the arm, a barb to the neck was debilitating. The other three floated in calmly, starting to cover their mandibles in the slime that allowed them to chew through metal and began floating towards Sierra. Wait, three? I guess Amber missed one. They began to list towards Sierra, lowering themselves to feed when a gunshot rang out. Then another. Then one more, and the last of the Wasps fell.
"I don't miss twice you... exoskeletoned bastards!" Amber shouted as she lowered her rifle, walking down from the employee stairs that she had disappeared up half an hour before. Ouch, good job for trying, but negative points for the shitty insult. It took to long too.
"That joke... sucked." I managed to say as I lay on the floor. Several of my muscles were still convulsing.
"Oh shit!" She shouted as she ran to my electrified body. "What happened?"
"Apparently the little 'Exoskeletoned Bastards' can shoot barbs that release a small electromagnetic pulse on contact." Sierra awnsered for me.
"Oh. I guess that makes sense. It'd explain how they took on the Enclave."
I tried to get up but only succeeded in slamming my face against the cold tile of the burger house s floor. "Ouch." Was all I could manage this time.
It took more than half an hour for me to regain enough feeling and control of my legs to stand, and an hour after that to regain all the feeling in my fingers. At first glance, I'd assumed that Sierra's armor was shot, but upon closer inspection, I realized that it had protection against this type of thing, and I was able to turn it back on and reset it just by plugging in my Pipboy and pressing a few buttons. After we had Sierra back with us we were ready to head out, but she stopped us.
"We still need to find those soldiers."
Amber crossed her arms and scowled. "They're dead."
"So? I still need to bury them." Amber looked at me for confirmation that this was okay. I just shrugged. I couldn't stop her from tending to her dead compatriots.
It only took us a few minutes to find their camp, just next to the burger house. There were metal shells of armor scattered everywhere. There were twelve. I was surprised that Sierra didn't reject looting their weapons and ammunition, or even take the slightest offense when we started searching the bodies before pulling them wherever Sierra wanted. We were only able to find one laser rifle though, the rest had been chewed on by the Teslawasps, along with all of the Microfusion cells. As Sierra went about digging holes and dragging what was left of the soldiers into them, I noticed one of the bodies wasn't decked out in armor, but a dark green type of suit. 2nd Leutenant Ermical. He hadn't been wearing power armor, so he might have been able to fight those creatures, or at least escape. But instead he lay there on the ground, electrical barb through his neck, and chest cavity burned out by acid. I saw his dog tag hanging from his neck and picked it up. Don't really know why I did it, but I slipped it into my bags and poked around the camp some more. There were only two tents, and the first one I checked was just full of sleeping bags (Though I scored a couple packs of 'Junk Food' and another kickass magazine on heavy weapons.). The second tent was much more rewarding. It was obviously the Officers, and had a desk that they must have pulled out of one of the buildings. Several clipboards lay on the tables, along with a Terminal and a what looked like a weird keychain. I downloaded the Terminals files onto my Pipboy for later then picked up the keychain. It was of the trademark 'Vault Boy' holding a crowbar and a bat while staring innocently off into the distance, and there was an Inscription on the bottom:
-Charisma is most effective when you can back up your arguments with a crowbar!-
I chuckled and slid its metal ring onto a similar one on my Pipboy, where it fit more snugly than it had a right too. I felt more 'Crowbar Charismatic' Just holding it. I looked to my right to see a large metal orb, about a foot in diameter, sitting on a table, several antennae sticking out of it in all directions. I tapped it but received only a metallic echo as a response. I turned to walk out when I heard a small robotic voice echo out of my Pipboy.
Please don't leave. Did you get my signal?
I spun back to the orb, which was now glowing and clicking and whirring to life. As I watched, it rolled it's burnished metal body off the table and wobbled in the air, floating as if held by some invisible hand. It shuddered in the air and dipped a few inches, but rose back up. Make that an invisible hand with Parkinson s. It whirred and beeped excitedly, and a the small robotic voice spoke through my Pipboy again.
I am Enclave Sandstorm Eyebot number B9-A113. Did you receive my signal?
I hit it with a bat.
