As Jonathan Corvan looked up from the blueprints, he sighed. The blueprints had been sent to him by that ghoul from Underworld, the one with a name like a flower, Tulip or something, and they interested him a great deal. As an inventor in the wasteland, one of the few, anything of that nature interested him. However, living in the small settlement of Mini-ton, he rarely got to flex his mind.
Mini-ton was a small, rundown settlement just east of the DC ruins consisting of less than five houses. The houses were packed with people, but most of them where like him. Not just inventors, but the kind of people who preferred to read than shoot, to think than scavenge. The kind of people celebrated before the war, who were now just dead weight, dragging the survivors down. Mini-ton had a proper name once, but that smart-ass Moira Brown had given it the nickname and it had stuck. No doubt Mini-ton was similar to its Mega counterpart, hell, it even had a UND (Un-exploded Nuclear Device)! However, all the name did was marginalise it even more. That was one of the reasons Corvan hated Moira. The other was that she was a fraud. That dunce couldn't tell left from right, let alone create a chemical formula to repel mole rats! All her work was stolen from him. When he and Moira had left the East Coast and travelled inland, he had elected to stay in Mini-ton while Moira had pushed on ahead to where she found Mega-ton. Because he lived in the tiny town no one had heard of, and Moira lived in one of the most famous towns in the wasteland her "inventions," were taken seriously, and he was treated as an uneducated yokel. If people had treated him more seriously, he could have sold enough of his inventions to pay for the med-x his mother had needed regularly. If it weren't for Moira, his mother would still be alive.
As he pushed the brass welding goggles up onto his forehead he looked back at the schematic and then to the creation in his hands and smiled. He tucked the crudely named 'Railway Rifle," into his pack. He'd give it to Tulip. Eventually. First, he would pay a visit to Moira Brown. As he began picking up the railway spikes scattered around his workshop he smiled again.
To be continued...