Jill Corner happily took up the pot. Her winnings of her favorite game of caravan was around 140 caps, a hardy pay. her good friend and beaten competitor Lacey scoffed and shook her head at her grinning winner.
"Dammit, Jill," she said half-joking half-serious. "At this rate, you're gonna take all of my glorious Republic pay." A self-jab at her lousy government wage.An ace of spades was put onto the caravan, the values adding up to 26, a winning score against the opposite caravan's 23. Jill Corner happily took up the pot. Her winnings of her favorite game of caravan was around 140 caps, a hardy pay. Her good friend and beaten competitor Lacey scoffed and shook her head at her grinning winner.
"Dammit, Jill," she said half-joking half-serious, rubbing her hair under her ball cap in an expression of frustration. "At this rate, you're gonna take the rest of my great pay." A self-jab at her lousy government wage.
Jill shrugged, that victorious smirk ever radiating bubbliness and confidence. "What can I say, Lace? I was born out of a slot machine." Her life motto. Gambling was her passion.
Lacey looked at her watch. It was near high noon. "Well," she sighed, getting up out of her chair. "I gotta man the bar. Rush hour soon," she jabbed a thumb behind her toward the raggedy excuse of a dive. While Jill was all over California, Lacey would serve drinks on her lonesome.
"Yeah. Bring me back more caps," she called over to her friend. She started putting back together her lucky deck. She slid the deck into her satchel and, standing up from the dirty chair and table, put it over her shoulder. She took one last swig of her beer and left it behind on the table. She waved over once more to Lacey and departed the Mojave Outpost barracks.
Outside, the weather was usual Mojave apathy; scorching heat and beating sun rays. In the wider expanses of desert, a man could think he'd gone blind from the sheer sight of the desert. If not for the good chance of being blinded, one may have seen it as beautiful as any forest or mountain range.
But that was not the case. The reality was that this godforsaken place was as uncaring for life as it was uncaring for appearance. The wasteland itself claimed the lives of countless wanderers, needless to say of the part of the wildlife that called it home. A manageable desert centuries ago was now an inhospitable host converted by the carelessness of man. The atomic bombs not only turned the most lush environment into a terrifying hellhole but transformed its wildlife into demons just as well. Snapping turtles were now bipedal beasts and chameleons feared amongst men as devils straight from hell. Few animals were spared horrific mutation.
But to the survivors of the new world like Jill, it was as normal as ordering a plate of gecko steak alongside a serving 200-year-old mashed potatoes. She checked and double-checked the packs saddled on the caravans' descendants of pre-war cattle, brahma. They had hitched her in a the crowded pens of the Outpost. Piles of shit from the brownish orange two-headed ungulates graced the pen floors but as rank as it was, it, too, didn't bother Jill at all.
All of her gear, and that of the Company, was right where it was kept. It wasn't with infrequency that property went missing from pack brahma as they stopped in the pens of crowded settlements. But it seemed that the caravan's lookout did a well enough job. Jill for the life of her couldn't remember the young lad's name. She vaguely recalled the other guards calling him Junior, and that's she called him to tell him to go get a drink. In the meantime, while waiting for Amos to get the caravan's papers cleared through - the Outpost was characteristically bureaucratic and slow - she'd take up watch and hold down the pack brahma.
She observed other travelers pass through the Outpost. Most of them would be looking to score it big in the grand Vice City, while others heading home to the Republic after losing uck at the tables. There was hardly much other reason to come to the Mojave. It wasn't wilderness but it was frontier. The Republic struck a deal with that enigmatic ruler of the Strip to pull power from the Hoover Dam for the states back home. In a way, the Vegas and its surrounding areas was sort of a colonised territory. The Republic's citizens lived out here, came to and from frequently, and the Army set up a headquarters just outside the Strip as well as establishing presences throughout the region. But at the same time, outsiders were just as prevalent. Hell, it was the reason why Jill had a job, and a well-compensating one at that. An assortment of towns, communities, and tribes were largely untouched by the Republic and some even had rather large confrontations, one of which was still infamously ongoing. The President's imperialistic policy - which brought the Republic to Vegas in the first place - would mean and already has meant death for natives who refused to cooperate as well as taxation of the surrounding communities should the Mojave fully come under the banner of the Bear.
The politics of the Mojave were as intricate as the biology of a nightstalker, as Jill often thought. She liked to think of herself as roughly educated in history and politics for reading such material when delivering them for the Company to some selfless organization with a name that gave it a sickly mystique.