Fallout belongs to Bethesda, Obsidian, Black Isle... but not me.

Up and down, the coin was flipped again and again, shining a bright silver in the lamplight.

"I can't fucking believe this." He could, actually. That was probably what pissed him off more than anything, though the situation at hand was one hell of a runner-up.

Stockholm watched, with a melange of disgust and disdain, at the hole the two 'Great' Khans were digging. Fuck all, it wasn't even a very good hole, and Stockholm had put enough holes in things to know a decent hole when he saw one.

"They say seeing is believing, baby, so off with those midnight shades- you're looking at the king of New Vegas."

Off went the sunglasses, only so Stockholm could stare Ben right in the eye. But without them, the sickly neon glare from New Vegas far in the distance made him squint a bit. "King? King?" That pissed Stockholm off enough to throw his sunglasses off into the night. "You think you're a king now, Big Ben? You think you can live off the spark and flint of that shithole? Didn't you learn anything?"

"Good enough, Benny?" One of the Khans asked mildly, gesturing at the gash in the ground with a rusted, bent shovel.

"Six feet under, Murph, and do I mean under," Ben said coolly without breaking eyes from Stockholm. "Vegas has been rolling hot like rigged slots ever since you rode off into the sunrise, Stocking, baby. But you're the coolest cat I know-"

"Knew," Stockholm cut in flatly. They called him Benny now? Fuck's sake. You don't intimidate raiders with a name like that.

"-Now I'm sure as shine you're gonna want a cut of this juicy pie, once we catch up. We've got everything, now. Food, water, chems, guns, girls aplenty-"

"All of that will go away." A boot to the ribs told Stockholm that the body in the dust didn't have anything to add to the conversation. "Like it always fucking does. Food and water run dry. Flesh gets old and dies. Guns break. That was what made the Boot Riders rise above, damn it. That you didn't ease the blow or stop short for fucking anything. Always on guard, at a half-cock around the fucking clock. And now," Stockholm couldn't bear to look at that nauseating checkered suit, so instead glared at the crumpled corpse at their feet- "Your edge is duller than those fucking shovels."

The two once-tribesmen stared at each other in silence, the fury so thick in the air those Khans couldnt've cut through with their shovels even if they were sharpened. Finally, one of them cleared his throat, leaning on his shovel impatiently. With one last long, loaded look at Stockholm, Big Ben- Benny- walked around the makeshift grave, getting an eyeful, and then rolled the body into the hole with a well-placed kick. As the corpse flopped in, Stockholm noted the two holes in the forehead, the wide, surprised eyes. Well, at least those holes were placed properly enough.

It took the Great Khans- grating cunts, a more fitting name, Stockholm thought coldly- no time at all to finish their work, and it was only after the two were patting down the dirt that one asked pointedly why they had brought three shovels if Big Be- Benny wasn't going to lift a finger.

"Somebody's got to supervise!" the checkered man said, and with a clap of his hands, off the party went, lamps in hand, leaving Stockholm in the dark. As Benny brushed shoulders with Stockholm, he said quietly, "Fifteen years. A dog'd wait for you, maybe, but I ain't a dog, and you ain't a dad."

Stockholm stood there, alone, staring at the fan of light reaching up to touch the sky. New Vegas. Less than twenty years before, this place didn't even have a name. Not even 'Mojave Wasteland', like those Goodsprings settlers called it. It was just sand, dust, and misery.

What the fuck had happened?

He sighed. That question could be answered on a better day. He reached into the breast pocket of his field jacket for those beloved sunglasses-

And then kicked the blank, wooden gravemarker right out of the cemetery. Fuck. His best ones, too.

So down the dirt path back into Goodsprings. He'd circle around, he thought, comb the sand and rock a bit- he couldn't have thrown it that far, strong as he is- when suddenly Stockholm pumped into an abnormally large refrigerator. On wheels.

Except that refrigerators aren't wheeled about in this part of Nevada, and especially not on Sundays. In the space of a heartbeat and a blink, Stockholm had hopped back and drawn his Colt Anaconda, hammer already cocked. But in that time, he had heard the click-clack of metal and the sound of a gatling gun revving up.

The two duelists stared each other down for a long, dirty second before the whirring stopped. "'Scuse me kindly, partner. Didn't mean to bowl ya over, there, no sir. Darker than an oil-dipped crow in a '49 shaft, yes sir."

Stockholm ran his eyes down the refrigerator-bot, and holstered his revolver upon confirming that this twang-tongued fellow was, in fact, not a a refrigerator. He hated the things. Lined with lead, just asking for cancer. Almost hated them as much as robots in general. "No mistakes were made," he murmured quietly, giving the machine a wide berth and a wary glance as it rolled its way up to the cemetery. A robot undertaker, huh? Well, Stockholm had seen some oddities in his short and relatively uneventful life, so what was one more?

Gun holstered as it was, he caressed the hammer involuntarily as he began his search of the sands 'round the graveyard for his sunglasses.

The west had changed.

And, frustratingly enough, there was usually only one way to keep something from changing.

Even more frustratingly, Stockholm thought as he dusted the sand off his killing glasses and pushed them back onto his nose, he would have to be the one to drive the bullet home.

So many goodnatured, pure-spirited protagonists out there. Well, Stockholm is anything but that. You might notice I've used this character before- and it's the same idea. Whether he meets the Not-So-Lone Wanderer this far west, now that's to be seen.

I'll keep the chapters short and to the point. How Stockholm likes most things.

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