Tired eyes opened reluctantly to reveal a somewhat blurry scene. There was a desk in the far corner of the room, far meaning only a few feet away, and a cabinet that leaned up against the wall between the desk and a bed. The bed touched three of the walls in the room and yet it couldn't have been more than five feet long. It was on the stone-hard mattress that Dragon laid, once asleep but now groggily awake.
The girl pushed herself up on the bed so that she could lean her back against the wall and spent the next few seconds recalling where she was. Her gaze focused in on the desk across the room. On top of it sat a variety of damaged books and comics yet a single one stood out amongst them. It was significantly larger than the others and sitting up against them, allowing the peeking skull on the cover to stare out into the room. The words on the front cover brought back several memories. It read, "The Wasteland Survival Guide."
Also on the desk sat a set of holotags, the form of military idea that members of a fighting force known in the wastes as the Brotherhood of Steel wore around their necks. The best treasure of all though rested on the desk next to these tags. Dragon traced the outline of the plasma rifle she had recovered out in the wastes with her slowly sharpening gaze. These clues helped to remind her of exactly where she was. In the loosest terms possible, she was home sweet home.
After the initial feeling of exhaustion dissipated, Dragon hopped off the bed and rose to her feet. She stretched her arms and bumped the nearby metal cabinet with her elbow, disturbing the liquid in the jar that sat on top labeled 'lump of brain.' The girl watched the ripples start and fade on the liquid's surface and, satisfied with the idea that the jar had no intentions of falling, reached with one of her hands to touch the back of her head. She felt for the familiar scar there; it brought back another memory.
Other than the few odds and ends sitting about, there wasn't much to the tiny room. There was some money, also known in the waste as caps, stuffed inside the desk's drawer and a few small guns and unused outfits in the locked cabinet, but nothing else of any particular interest. Dragon didn't even bother opening the cabinet to grab some gear for the day; she was already dressed for success since she'd fallen asleep in her casual clothing and the only weapon she needed sat on the desk before her.
The girl picked up the plasma rifle and slung it over her shoulder, making sure to grab the extra power cells it used for ammo off the desk as well. The weapon clicked against a metal chain that hung from her collar, a piece she'd added to her otherwise bland apparel. She wore what was known as a mercenary cruiser outfit; basically just a plain white shirt with a black leather overcoat, black leather pants and a compilation of different materials and chains wrapped around her arms and legs. She blended in perfectly with the other humans of the wasteland. The only thing that made her really stand out in a crowd was her Pip Boy 3000, the computer she'd had wrapped around her left forearm since her tenth birthday. She still had no preference for the gadget, but it had proved to be a worthy tool in the first few months after she'd left the vault.
Dragon adjusted the gun one final time so that it hung comfortably on her back before moving to leave the room. Once through the doorway, she looked around again. She was currently on the top floor of a very small house. Behind her was the room where she slept, to her left was another small room that she used for storage and to her right was a sort of small catwalk. On the far side of the catwalk was a small table set up with some flasks, beakers and other scientific objects sitting on it. Also on the catwalk was a small rolling table with a tray and a bunch of doctor tools on top. A small piece of the walk next to her held a decorative table, a wooden chair, and a Nuka Cola soda machine.
The interior of the house was unexceptionally drab. All the walls were stained a sickly brown, the roof had a several cracks that let a few rays of light in and the floors always looked like they were speckled with dirt and grime. No amount of cleaning or decorating would ever make the place look decent again, but Dragon at least tried to spruce it up a bit by setting around a few of her wasteland souvenirs. A Civil War draft poster hung on the far side of the catwalk, guns and armor of every shape and size filled the room next to her and a few old comics sat on the table near the soda machine. It wasn't much, but it was enough.
A sudden noise caught the girl's attention. It sounded like someone was fumbling around downstairs and a familiar growling was already on its case. Dragon already had an idea about what was going on down there but she moved to check it out anyway. She reached the top of the steps that rested along the wall opposite the one her room was part of and headed down them. The scene before her was a normally humorous one on any other day but today, the girl just didn't feel like smiling.
On the first floor of the house was her hovering robot butler, Wadsworth, struggling to gather up a few things that had been knocked off of some nearby shelving. He was having a lot of trouble because Dragon's pet dog, Desoto, had his jaws clamped tightly around one of his robotic metal arms and was pulling as hard as he could, threatening to rip the steel from its socket. The canine, a middle-aged doberman pinscher with an overly protective personality, must have found some sort of humor in messing with the robot butler because he caused trouble for the machine on a daily basis; even if that meant knocking making a mess of his owner's stuff just so Wadsworth could clean it up.
Desoto let go of the butler as soon as he saw his master and started wagging his stub-of-a-tail furiously. His tongue lolled from his mouth and any guilt he might have felt for the robot that he had been cruel to was too well hidden for Dragon to see. The girl stood motionless at the bottom of the steps, eyeing the dog's sudden enthusiasm. Wadsworth, finishing up the last of the reorganizing, turned to face her as well and spoke in his mechanical, servant-sounding voice. "Good morning, Madame. It's nice to see you're alive and well today. I do apologize if the noise I was causing is the reason for your early awakening. The canine company we share this house with seems to cause more trouble than it's worth."
Dragon's eyes shifted from the dog to the robot, back to the dog and to the robot again. She narrowed her gaze at the mechanical butler, somewhat offended by his comment. She had found Desoto wandering around and mourning the death of his past owner in a scrapyard to the east of the town she was currently living in during one of her first weeks out of the vault. Since then, he had been her only lifeline more than once during her days of wandering in the waste. She would let him tear apart her entire house, destroy Wadsworth and kill every living being in the wasteland if he wanted to. He had been a priceless friend and companion to her for nearly four full years now, so of course he was worth indescribably more than the trouble he caused.
The girl didn't give this reasoning to her robot butler though. That was something she had learned to get used to while living with Wadsworth; a robot is and forever will be just a machine. He could pretend to have feelings, but he never truly did. There was no way he'd be able to compute the connection between a master and their dog. So, she responded with silence instead.
"Is there anything I could do for you today, Madame?" Dragon finally stepped away from the staircase, patted Desoto's head and opened her mouth to speak. "You could tell me a joke." The girl stepped past the dog and robot and moved to a far corner of the room that could be considered the kitchen. There were some shelves covered in various kitchen-related objects next to an old, stained and still somewhat functional refrigerator. A sink could be found in the corner as well, but the irradiated water was useless for anything and so the girl avoided using it at all costs.
The robot butler paused and selected a random proverb from his long-exhausted list of jokes. Dragon was already familiar with the different sayings Wadsworth could cook up; about the only entertainment she got from his attempting anymore was from simply trying to guess which overused line he would pick. The metallic voice started back up again as the girl, with a hungry dog now waiting patiently for breakfast at her side, scavenged a meal from the fridge.
"It's common knowledge that irradiated cats have 18 half-lives." The robot waited expectantly for the home-owner's response but it never came. Instead, Dragon continued to sort through the messy collection of what could be called 'food' in the refrigerator. She began to speak below her breath, "Mole rat meat… no. Squirrel on a stick… no. Salisbury steak…?" She pulled the item in question off of one of the fridge shelves and started looking over the packaging. The red box was faded and the writing was hard to read. "How old is this thing?" Her interrogative comment was answered as she finally identified an expiration date on the back of the package. Her face twisted into disgust upon realizing the processed piece of scrap meat was well over two hundred years expired.
Dragon tossed the box onto the floor. Even if she wouldn't eat it, Desoto would probably consider it gourmet. The doberman didn't hesitate to grab it up and start tearing at the cardboard packaging so he could get to the treat inside. The girl went back to rummaging through the fridge and, accepting the fact that just about any of the food within would be absolutely unappetizing, pulled out a bottle of water.
After shutting the fridge, Dragon turned around and walked over to the nearest chair while trying her best not to trip over the dog that laid in the middle of the floor, sprawled out and with half of an expired steak hanging from his mouth. Upon sitting, the girl opened the bottle of clean water and allowed her gaze to wander around the interior of the house's bottom floor. After all, there wasn't much else for her to do. That's something else she had gotten used to since she'd left the vault; there was never anything to do anywhere, and there was certainly no one else to hang around with other than her dog.
The girl's gaze jumped from one end of the room to the other. Next to the steps she had walked down was a line of shelves which were covered in various knick-knacks she had retrieved from the waste. There were a few more old comics sitting on one end, a basketball next to them, a red truck that said 'Nuka-Cola' on the shelf below, a human skull next to that… just about anything interesting she'd found in the waste had a home on one of those shelves. Next to the shelving was the corner with the kitchen and the nearest corner to that is where Dragon currently sat. She was in a corner between a large scientific-looking object that was sold to her as a room decoration to remind her of life in the vault and a few lockers where she hoarded a bunch of junk. The junk lockers were also where she kept parts that she could turn into customized weapons though, so the metal doors on the front were all breaking apart from the constant abuse of having metal scraps packed into them and the occasional, corrosive fission battery acid leak.
Further down the wall was a stand designed to hold her Vault Boy bobble-head collection. Vault Boy had been a sort of mascot of Vault 117 during her childhood which is why she was forced to question how so many bobble-heads of him had been scattered over the waste. It wasn't uncommon for her to be strolling through a collapsed building swarmed with super mutants and raiders only to find a conveniently placed, head-nodding figure of the mascot resting peacefully on a desk nearby. After finding twenty of the toys, she had finally given up on wondering what their source may be. Instead, she resorted to using them and their individual playful antics to spiff up her home.
Past the bobble-head stand was a workbench that was currently littered with scraps of metal, "Wonderglue" brand glue and an assortment of other weapon parts. This is the bench at which Dragon molded some of her most amusing weaponry; everything from a dart-gun with a toy car at its base and a rocket launcher that could launch… well, anything.
In another corner of the room was a second set of lockers. These lockers were a bit sturdier than those across the room as they were filled with a variety of items that didn't threaten to dissolve or collapse the metal shelving within. Instead, they were packed with sawed-off human fingers, several boxes of an old-fashioned cereal known as "Sugar Bombs," books that hadn't been overly damaged during their stay in the waste, and a large selection of other gizmos and gadgets that didn't seem to go hand-in-hand. These were the lockers in which Dragon stored her items to be taken back into the waste; many of them were items that people she had met asked her to collect on her journey through the wasteland. As with most of her actions in the decimated modern world, she only did this because she looked forward to the reimbursement.
In the fourth corner is where Dragon's radio was located as it was built into another vault furniture-looking machine. The radio was almost always left on but it was off for the time being. In the past day especially, the girl had grown tired of the everyday radio announcer, Three Dog, saying the same shit about her and her journey through the wasteland that he always did. Not long after she had left the vault, Dragon had ventured deep into the urban wasteland that was once Washington, D.C. It was here she discovered a radio station building under attack by overly-irradiated monsters and was invited by Brotherhood of Steel soldiers to help fight off the attackers. After her success in doing this, Three Dog, an African American man who stayed at the radio building known as Galaxy News Radio and took pride in preaching over the radio about "fighting the good fight," took it upon himself to talk about her and just about all of her adventures in the wasteland. The girl wished that she knew where he got all of his information from. Everything he said about her was always right, which was sort of creepy and stalker-like, but she often got tired of re-living her adventures as the announcer felt the need to elaborate on them again and again every single day.
Also in that corner of the house was where Dragon kept a plate of the ground. This plate was for Desoto and it was often covered in mutilated body parts but the girl could see from where she sat that the plate was empty and had been licked clean. No wonder the doberman relished the Salisbury steak so much, he probably hadn't eaten in quite a while. The girl noted she would have to put out more food for him later but for now, she tipped up the bottle in her hands and chugged the clean water. It was refreshing, something that couldn't be said for any consumable in the waste except for Aqua Pura.
When the bottle was empty, the girl held it out in front of her so she could look at the label. It lacked all the information a bottle preceding it by two hundred years would have had; there were no nutrition facts, no bottling company information, and there was no way to be certain whether or not the container held exactly sixteen ounces of the beverage. It was plain and straight-forward. That's how things needed to be in the waste.
The only things on the label were the name of the beverage, "Aqua Pura," and a brotherhood of steel symbol since they were the group currently working on bottling and shipping the drink. Both of these symbols brought back memories to the girl though. She had been a large part of the reason why Aqua Pura even existed.
Dragon left Vault 117 of her own free will not long after she had taken the GOAT. She hadn't liked her outcome of the taste and she knew changing it wouldn't be enough to satisfy here. Life in the vault had just been too… mechanic. Everyone woke up, socialized, half-assed their jobs, went back to sleep and then they did it all over again the very next day. Dragon didn't want to be the overseer of such a mundane life. She needed to get out of that place and so, she did.
One of her childhood friends, Artur Trela, had discovered the exit of Vault 117 during one of his in-depth explorations as a Loyalty Inspector. Having such a title just meant he was allowed to carry around keys to every room in the vault and go places where none of them had ever been able of allowed to go to in their youth. When he came across the exit, word of it spread between Dragon's friends. She had been the only one to express a serious want to put the exit to use after two hundred years of silence.
And so, about two weeks after the GOAT and a few days before her seventeenth birthday, the girl managed to slip out of the underground dwelling she had called home for so long. Although this went against everything the vault for meant for, to protect the future generations from the hideousness of the wasteland, she didn't have a single regret. No one bothered to follow her. They all figured she'd be dead by the end of the day.
Such wasn't the case though. On her first day in the wasteland, the girl managed to set herself up for success. She had discovered an abandoned town near the vault entrance that was once called Springvale. Some of the adults, including her parents, had mentioned it down in the vault as it's where their own parents had once lived before choosing to move underground. Back then though, it had been a colorful town full of jolly people. Now, it was nothing more than a collection of the rotting, collapsing remains of housing and the same dust covered scenery that seemed to stretch for miles in the wasteland. After scavenging around the town and collecting an old pistol, ammo, and some tattered clothing, Dragon disembarked with a semi-valid conclusion forming in here mind; there was nothing left of the world her grandparents once knew.
Later in the day, the girl discovered an unexpected settlement with a robot standing guard in front of it. The robot greeted her and, a bit hesitant to talk back to the machine, she slipped into the town without much further interaction. It was bad enough that she was in an unfamiliar element, she figured conversing with a mechanized human would be a bit out of her league. It was in this town known as Megaton, which was little more than a crater with an active nuclear bomb wedged into the ground at it's center, that she found hope for a decent future in the waste. From the beginning, she created a mental list of people to cling to and people to avoid. The town's sheriff, Lucas Simms, quickly made it onto her list of people to like since he was the first to welcome her and point her around the town. He also introduced her to his son, Harden Simms, who she found to be friendly enough to make it onto her like list as well. Both of them pointed to the various buildings in the town and recommended where she should head to next.
She began at a building known as "The Brass Lantern" where she meant Andy and Jenny Stahl. They were the owners of the little bar and both of them seemed fairly nice, but there was something odd about the way Andy acted that made Dragon suspicious of him. She then went on to visit the little clinic in the town where Doc Church, a bitter man that took quickly to disliking her, chased her off without so much as even asking if she needed medical help. Above the clinic was a general store known as "Craterside Supply." It was here that Dragon was given her first opportunity to explore deeper into the waste. Although a bodyguard on one side of the room continuously commented on how novice she was, the eccentric store owner, Moira Brown, offered her compensation for running a few errands in the waste. She figured it couldn't be anything too bad so she agreed without hesitation.
After being asked to visit a run-down grocery store a bit ways off from Megaton in order to collect some food, Dragon left Craterside Supply. She had intentions of fulfilling the quest however, she was more interested in learning about the town she was currently in first. She paid a visit to a man known as Walter in the town's water processing plant who asked her to fix some leaking pipes, she stopped in the Church of the Children of Atom and listened to their preaching about the bomb in the center of the town before walking out in boredom, and she even snuck into a few different houses and poked through some of their owner's belongings. By the time she walked out of the final house, she was a few hundred caps richer and carried an old assault rifle with very limited ammunition on her back.
After she was finished with exploring in places she didn't belong, she walked into Megaton's second and seemingly more popular bar, "Moriarty's Saloon." It was in there she met most of the characters she would be associating her life with in the future. Behind the bar was a ghoul, a zombified yet non-feral human, known as Gob who liked the girl from the moment she walked in the door simply for the fact that she wasn't horrified by his appearance. He offered her a discounted drink but she politely refused, wanting to preserve the caps she did have. There was also a woman in the room who worked for the saloon, however, her profession was in being a prostitute. Her name was Nova and although she came off as a nice person, Dragon couldn't help but feel uncomfortable in her presence.
There was an older man by the name of Jericho who sat on one of the nearby bar stools, making nasty comments about the girl and how she didn't belong in the wasteland. Dragon did her best to ignore him. She later found out that he was a retired raider, meaning he had professed in hating, mutilating and just plain slaughtering people back in his prime. It was in his blood to be a malicious person. Dragon eventually met Colin Moriarty as well, the owner of Moriarty's Saloon. He had an unfamiliar Irish accent and didn't seem overly welcoming, but the girl had a feeling she'd be spending a lot of her time in his bar in the future so it wouldn't be in her best wishes to get on his bad side.
There had been one other person in the bar when Dragon walked in by the name of Mr. Burke, but she could barely remember the conversation she had once had with him. Supposedly, he needed her to blow up the bomb in the center of Megaton and destroy the town and everyone in it, but she had other plans for her new found home. One event led to another and Mr. Burke ended up killing the town sheriff, which impulsively led to Dragon popping a cap in his ass. Lucas Simms' death was followed by his son taking over management of the town and giving Dragon a key to her own house in the crater. It was this building that Dragon would call home base for the next four years.
After a few days of mingling with the overall standoffish population of Megaton, she finally gathered up enough courage to head back into the waste. She did the only things she could think to do, travel from building to building, settlement to settlement, meeting new people, gathering caps and supplies and returning to her base in Megaton every now and then to drop off what she'd collected and improve her rank on the town's social ladder. Every day she was making new connections and putting together the clues she gathered from settlers and wanderers to map out what was left of the modern world's Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, all better combined and known as the Capital Wasteland.
It was during one of these explorations she had come across the Brotherhood of Steel and befriended a group of them known as the Lyon's Pride, led by Sarah Lyons. She assisted them in defending the Galaxy News Radio building in which she met Three Dog. He had plans to improve the wasteland through the use of his radio station, and eventually these plans must have gotten to Dragon's head. When she had left Vault 117, she did so in search of adventure. Three Dog inspired an idea for such an adventure, the wasteland proved worthy in assisting the idea and she had the Brotherhood to help back her up. Her plans were to create a clean water source for everyone in the Capital Wasteland. The idea may have sounded a bit farfetched at the time but then again, no one had expected a young girl to leave an underground haven in search of adventure in the hellhole that was the waste, but that had, for whatever ungodly reason, happened.
Dragon spent the next several months traveling between her home in Megaton, the science labs of a large ship-based settlement known as Rivet City, and the crumbling remains of what was the Jefferson Memorial some two hundred years before. It was in the labs of Rivet City that she worked with other scientists in a rather fruitless attempt to create a clean water source. Any piece of success they might have had became part of machine that was being held in the memorial a distant ways off from the ship. This machine would, one day, be their ticket to fresh water.
Another thing that the girl was learning about the wasteland was that wherever good seemed to be happening, some sort of malevolence was always lingering near or standing by. The issue of the water-cleansing machine in the heart of DC was no different. Another group of elite soldiers, clad in power armor very similar to that of the Brotherhood of Steel's, threatened to ruin the scientists' plan of clean water for all. These adversaries were collectively known as the Enclave.
The Enclave was all that remained of the United States' government of the past. Most of them were descendants of politicians or congressmen, yet all of them had it in their mind that they still had some sort of control over the badlands that were once the land of the free and the home of the brave. They felt that they were the only pure human beings left in North America, and for that reason they needed to purge the irradiated filth of other living organisms from their country. This meant killing everyone and everything that was every seriously exposed to radiation. That included Dragon and just about everyone she knew.
It wasn't long before the Enclave captured the girl and took her to their base at Raven Rock, a company run headquarters far to the northwest of the DC ruins. It was there she met the leader of the faction, President John Henry Eden. She hadn't been expecting a super-computer to be the leader of the division of professional soldiers and claiming-to-be law bringers, but that's exactly what the president was. Courtesy of the robots Dragon had encountered on her many journeys, as well as the one she shared her home with, the girl had quite an expansive knowledge on how to mess with a machine's mind.
Eden did everything in his mechanical power to try to convince Dragon that the Enclave was only trying to help future America. He explained that all ghouls, feral or not, were nothing more than hosts to diseases and disgust. He explained that the wasteland's irradiated wildlife was only a collection of suffering animals that needed to be put out of their misery. And he explained that almost all humans that weren't in the Enclave were already too overly exposed to nuclear residue and that they would all turn feral themselves eventually. Dragon wasn't buying any of it.
The computer tried again and again to change the girl's train of thought but alas, she remained stubborn. Instead of preaching further, Eden decided to cut to his point and hand over something to her that he felt she could put to use. It was a small canister containing a sample of the Forced Evolutionary Virus, better known as FEV. This was the virus that turned humans and other beings into irradiated monsters, but this particular strain had been modified so that it would kill all forms of life with any degree of radioactive or virally-induced mutation. The president hoped that the girl would find it in herself to add this string of the virus to the water she planned to purify, thus ridding at last part of the east coast of mutation and making the Enclave's job that much easier.
After nearly an hour of debate between human and machine, Dragon had somehow convinced Eden that his programming was faulty and his actions in leading the Enclave were actually doing more to harm the chances of an ultimate goal of radiation eradication then help them. The system began to overload and the president himself became the self-destructing bomb that would soon destroy the Enclave base at Raven Rock.
This may have been the end of President John Henry Eden and the possibility of adding the FEV to the Potomac River water supply that was to be cleansed, but it was nowhere near the end of the Enclave. Another man by the title of Colonel Augustus Autumn had his own plans for the faction. Colonel Autumn had been second in command to the president and leader of the Enclave military. Though he often disagreed with the super computer's desires, he had gone along with the FEV plan from the start, following in the footsteps of his father. Since the president was finally out of the way, there was nothing to stop him from leading his army on a new mission. He didn't have the same intentions as Eden had; he didn't want to kill anyone in the waste. Instead, his plans were to take over the water cleansing process after the scientists of Rivet City and Dragon were finished with their discoveries. He would claim all credit for the project, he would be in control of the wasteland's only fresh water, and every being in the waste would then turn to him and the Enclave for assistance. He would restore order to the United States without killing a soul. They would all seek his guidance, and he'd be the reason for the revival of the states as a nation of power in the post-nuclear world.
Just like with Eden's plan, Dragon wouldn't be having any of this either. The cleansing of the water played out as the scientists had hoped and all seemed to be going well until Colonel Autumn and a few of his Enclave lackeys decided to pay a surprise visit to the Jefferson Memorial, home to what was now known as Project Purity. Dragon happened to be present at the time, overseeing the development and making sure the newly bottled Aqua Pura, the freshest water in the Potomac, was being sent out on caravans to everywhere. Autumn confronted her and warned her that she better step down from her leadership position or else the Enclave would wreak havoc on the operation. The girl merely laughed in his face. She reminded him of who had been the person to survive a life in the waste against all odds, who had been the person that put up with the nuisance of Autumn's faction day after day and could now chase off the power armor clad men just by waving her gun in the air, and who had been the one to completely destroy the Enclave base that had been left in his hands to protect. The Colonel wasn't so hard-assed with his next few comments.
As she had done with the president, Dragon convinced Autumn that his plan was faulty and America could never be fully restored. She brought on what seemed to be a change of heart in the man; she said she would let him walk away alive if he discontinued working with the Enclave and he agreed. The girl didn't think much of what may become of the Colonel, she simply figured she'd never hear from him again. He was a thing of the past.
The Capital Wasteland grew relatively boring after this last run-in with Autumn. The Enclave were still around to cause trouble, but they never proved to be a threat to the Jefferson Memorial anymore. Dragon stayed with the scientists at Project Purity for a short time before finally turning to the Brotherhood for assistance. They were aware she had been working with the scientists to create clean water and they were more than willing to take over the project for her since it had finally happened. Elder Lyons, the leader of the east coast's Brotherhood of Steel, sent many of his followers to help with the job. Within a day, they had become professionals at managing the processing, bottling and shipping of Aqua Pura across the waste. Dragon's leadership was no longer needed.
This left the girl with a lot of free time. She had already explored a large portion of the waste; she was familiar with just about every building and every living being between her hometown of Megaton and the stationary vessel that held Rivet City. So with her free time, Dragon went on to explore what she'd never seen in the wasteland. In a month, she was familiar with the entire southwest Maryland, northeast Virginia and post-apocalyptic DC area.
With nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, Dragon retired to her home in Megaton. It was here she would spend the next three and half years drinking at Moriarty's saloon, socializing with the not-so-people-friendly townsfolk and leaving only to do a little yao guai or mole rat hunting. Life was good.
The peace that comes with a simple life was never quite for Dragon though. Every day, whether through her own mind or through Three Dog's ranting on the radio, the girl was forced to relive just about every experience she'd already made it through in the waste. The radio announcer continuously told the tale of a time when Dragon had visited a plant filled settlement known as Oasis and killed a living, talking tree there, a time with she had rescued a little boy from the destroyed town of Grayditch after a hive of giant, fire-spitting, genetically modified ants had killed his friends and family, and a time in which she'd allowed a pack of feral ghouls into a fancy building known as Tenpenny Tower so they could kill everyone and take over, simply because the tower's residents were unwilling to share their home with the irradiated zombies.
Another memory haunted the girl though, one that went back even further then her meeting with Three Dog and her residency in Megaton. From time to time she would still think back on the life she left behind when she walked out of Vault 117. She would remember her friends and the childhood spent with them. She often found herself wondering about how they were doing, if life in the vault had changed after she left, or whether or not they even remembered her. It was thoughts like these that allowed her mind to take control of her and replay parts of her childhood while she slept. Curiosity had been the inspiration of the dream she'd been having when the antics of Wadsworth and Desoto woke her up.
Dragon snapped out of her reverie to find her robot butler still hovering in front of the shelving by the staircase and her anxious dog sitting at her feet and staring up at her. Dragon glanced back at the nearly empty bottle of Aqua Pura and then back to Desoto. It was obvious what he wanted. The girl rose from the chair and moved to the kitchen-corner of the house, collecting a small bowl off of one of the shelves when she got there. She poured the remaining water in the bowl and walked across the room to set it in the dog's own corner, right next to his food dish.
It was in the wall between Desoto's corner and the corner that held her take-back-into-the-waste-items locker that the door to the house could be seen. It was a creaky old door and several rays of light managed to slip through the areas between it and its frame, but at least it was relatively efficient at keeping people out. It was a quiet knock at this door at the given moment that sent the doberman into a barking tantrum. Dragon looked to the door that was only a few feet from where she now stood, frustration slowly playing across her face. She knew exactly who was knocking and, if she unfamiliar with the idea that the person who chose to disturb her now would continuously knock for hours on end if that's what it took to get her to open the door, Dragon would have completely ignored the interruption.
Rather than attempt to wait out the knocker's patience, the girl reached out and opened the door to her house. The daylight was blinding at first but both her and Desoto's eyes quickly adjusted. Once satisfied that it was indeed the same African American woman who knocked on the house's door nearly every day and not some mutated, zombified freak that planned on killing all residents in the house, Desoto quieted down. Dragon simply stared at the woman, trying to make her aggravation as obvious as possible.
"Dragon, it's been a while…" The woman's voice trailed off. The girl was forced to silently question how the dark-skinned lady's mind functioned, after all, the two had seen each other just the day before and almost every day straight for three years before that. "I wish there were more people like you in the world…" And with that, the African American reached forward with something in her hand and the girl took it from her. The woman immediately walked away without another word.
Dragon had grown semi-used to this awkward interaction that occurred on a daily basis first thing every morning. The woman would knock, Dragon would answer, she'd receive some inspirational comment and then the older lady would hand over some sort of small gift. The girl was never entirely sure what the other's motivation was, but she always assumed it had something to do with her stopping Mr. Burke from blowing up the town.
She now looked down to see what small gift she'd received from the woman today. In her hands was a small reptile, a bit crispy around the edges and with a skewer impaled through the length of its body. Dragon had never been much of a fan of The Brass Lantern's specialty, iguana on a stick, so she turned around and let her dog snatch the snack out of her grasp. The girl winced as she watched him eat; there wasn't the slightest bit of hesitation in his action. He swallowed the thing nearly whole, chewing only enough so that he could break apart the skewer and swallow it as well. Clearly, the sharp piece of wood didn't agree well with his stomach. He coughed what was left of the skewer back up, stared at the now slimy pieces that rested on the floor of Dragon's home, and proceeded to gather them back up in his mouth, chew them again, and swallow. This time, he kept the stick down. The girl shook her head in slight disgust and spoke below her breath, "Lovely."
Dragon decided it was time to start her usual daily routine, a routine that included little more than stopping at Moriarty's Saloon and then paying a visit to a few of the other people around town before returning to her house again for another night. She turned back towards the front door, opened it, and allowed the light of day to seep into the building for a second time. Dragon waved a short farewell to Wadsworth and, with Desoto at her side, stepped out of house.
The stench of an irradiated world filled her nose but it was a smell she'd long since gotten used to and come to enjoy. It was her definition of a breath of fresh air only… without the fresh. She allowed her gaze to wander into the town. Her house was built on a platform that extended out of the crater wall so it stood out well above the majority of the town. Below her was The Brass Lantern, the clinic, the atom bomb surrounded by the religious Children of Atom, and a few other people and buildings of little interest. All the way around the walls of the crater, either level with her house or a bit lower, were other houses and buildings such as the public restrooms, Craterside Supply and Moriarty's Saloon. The overall town was as drab and colorless as the inside of Dragon's house, but one really couldn't expect there to be much joy and wonder in a post-nuclear village.
Satisfied that nothing new was occurring in the town and she was looking at the same old shit she saw every single day in Megaton, Dragon turned around to face her house one more time before walking away. She shut her front door, locked it, and then she finally noticed something that filled her with an explainable rage. Stuck on the door was a pamphlet that spoke about "Holy Water" that could be found at the Holy Light Monastery right outside of Springvale. Two things about this piece of yellowed paper pissed the girl off. To start with, she'd had dealt with those fools at the monastery years ago not much after she'd finished up with Project Purity. They had been blessing water or something, but the real issue was that they were taking the Aqua Pura that was supposed to be being delivered to Megaton in order to do this. They had been unrightfully stealing water and then advertising their religion all around town, so Dragon had to step in and dispose of them. They part that bothered her was that they were indeed long gone, but someone still felt the need to put up pamphlets anyway.
The second thing that bothered her was that she ripped the pamphlet off of the door, balled it up and threw it away every single day. Every day she'd take one down only to find another pinned to her door the very next morning. The never-ending presence of the pamphlet bothered her to no end, and today was no different. Dragon ripped the paper off the door, shredded it and threw it over the railing next to her house so that all the little pieces rained down gently onto the heads of the Megaton settlers below. She managed to yell, "Fucking water pamphlet!" somewhere along the way.
Dragon stood at the railing and watched the reactions of the townspeople below before turning back to the door of her house. It was now pamphlet-free and the girl's anger was replaced with a sort of smirk. She looked down at Desoto who waited patiently for his master to start moving and then she turned so that she could face the path that led to Moriarty's. She then said aloud the motto that the Mister Gusty brand robots, a variation of Wadsworth's own model, were programmed to shout in the heat of battle…
"Another glorious day in this man's army."