Chapter 1
It was late in the season, what people used to call Autumn before the Great War. The War's contaminated atmospheric dust kept the temperatures cool most of the time now, and all the seasons blended into one. Outside the crumbling walls of the library, there were occasional echoes of gunfire in the distance. Inside, there was only the creaking of the old floorboards under the burden of the Brotherhood of Steel sentries who stood watch over Scribe Yearling. She sat at the lobby desk as she paged through pre-war books and compiled her notes. The silent room with it's flickering light and shadows cast from the burning barrels, was to be their forward operating base of operations until she had gathered all the intel she could from the ancient tomes.
She knew this place would be a goldmine as soon as they stepped through the front door. Aging books have a distinct musty smell; a tell-take scent of cellulose that told her there were many books still hidden here. It was a scent she liked, she thought of it as the scent of knowledge. From the time of her early youth, she would seek out that scent, as she scampered through the underground tunnels and destroyed buildings above. Reading was something she had learned from her mother one bedtime story at a time.
On this patrol, many of the books she had discovered had been of little technological value, so she spent the majority of her time studying literary works of the past. Some of them had potential political or strategic value, such as the copy of The Prince, by Machiavelli or Sun Tzu's, The Art of War. Others took the opposite view and warned of despot rulers and what they would do with the uncontrolled power if a society was foolish enough to hand it to them. One such book she read was called 1984, by George Orwell. She thought it was intriguing that the dreaded room of torture in the book, bore the same number as the vault of the Lone Wanderer. He was now one of her confidants, having agreed to bring in pre-war books for her to catalog. Thanks to his contributions, she now had enough volumes of books to keep her busily extrapolating information for months.
He had also told her some interesting tales of his travels. Two of the locations he mentioned had struck her memory, a hamlet called Canterbury and a building named Dunwhich. She later checked her catalog of entries and found books referring to both. The Canterbury Tales, By Chaucer and The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft. She went on to check another name he had mentioned, Arefu. She found a reference to a pre-war town in Romania. That story centered around the vampire, Dracula, in a book of the same name, written by Bram Stoker. None had been direct correlations, but she made a note of it.
This evening's selection was titled, Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. It like so many of man's dark imaginings was based on man's fear of the unknown; the dark things of the night. In this book, it took the form of Aliens that looked like giant ants. She smiled, so much fear of monsters that didn't exist, when the real danger was themselves. The book did address an interesting dilemma though. One of restraint and ethics. How far do you take revenge? When can you say - 'enough'?
Scribe Yearling looked at the swirled signature on the interior plate of the book. The authors signature was almost art. She closed the book and felt the soft, tattered leather of the book cover and looked at the edges of the pages. There were only traces of the gold leaf edges that had once shown brightly. It was a collectable edition, someone had treasured this.
A/N: Some references were gathered from the list of "Fallout 3 Cultural References" from the Falloutwikia site, except Ender's Game, which I felt might be referred to by the ants of Shalebridge since you are offered the option to help them. That leather-bound, signed copy of Ender's Game, could possibly be from my collection. I just won an auction for it on EBay.