4/7/12 - Edited this one as well. By the way, my Courier's tagged skills are Small Guns, Sneak, and Repair. Science and Melee Weapons are her next two highest.


The Courier has spent days in the Mojave, even traveling through many of them without a sure supply of water. She relies too heavily on her luck, and now she's regretting the decision. It has given her a new level of arrogance, and she reflects on the godly feelings of power it has given her in the past week.

Escaping death in Goodsprings…she was beginning to regret crawling from the grave. The first night she spends in Nipton makes her think that dying from those two bullets might not have been such a terrible thing.

She's on her knees, silently waiting for Vulpes and his troops to disappear over the horizon, anticipating the moment they're just tiny dots so she can move.

When she does, every single one of her muscles cries out in pain. Her skin is prickling, and it reminds her of the previous night's dust storm, when she had to squint her eyes to keep the flecks of debris from stinging them.

"Do you fear death, degenerate?" he asks her, the question hanging over her entire being, tugging at her skin like the ripper that began edging towards her. It whirred relentlessly, sounding like a thousand rattlesnakes all at once. The Courier glances down at her hands, remembering the last time she had been on her knees, bound and gagged. The man in the checkered suit had expressed pity, but not enough to let her go.

There is no such distress on Vulpes's face, and when he repeats the question, she clenches her fists. She can't do anything – her body is in shock, and she forces herself to remain still and stoic in the face of danger. Her mind, too, was still. She couldn't find the words to respond.

"Do you fear death, degenerate?" he demands again, this time backhanding her across the face. Her head jolts to the side as his knuckles connect with her cheekbone, leaving a blistering red welt, but the only sound she makes is a soft hiss of pain.

Bitter, angry tears spring to her eyes, and her hands begin to shake. Why, goddammit, why? She was showing such weakness in front of these…there was no word disgusting enough to describe them.

There was dark, threatening impatience when he spoke, a hanging evil to his tone - one that made her hand her head and close her eyes. It stretches the shadows beyond her eyelids, forcing itself into her conscious and making his words inescapable. Her nails, which she chews to the quick, are digging into her palms, drawing half-circles of blood as they break the skin of her palm.

He's menacing, and even if she could remember her past life, she doubts that there was a moment she was more terrified than she is now.

"I can see that you do not fear the end, degenerate whore," he decides, pacing around her slowly. The more he stares at her, the more she feels like he knows everything about her; her every secret, even her past.

She wants to scream, but she can't bring her words to the surface.

"Here's the truth: Legionnaires do not fear death."

She lifts her head, attempting to block out his words. She stares up at the distant, unreachable stars above the Mojave. Vulpes grabs her chin, wrenches it back down, forcing her to look at the ground again.

Her teeth snap together painfully, and for the second time in the past two days, her mouth fills up with blood.

"Most Legionnaires do not fear death, but they are weak to it – they are susceptible to pain, and are probably the first to die in a battle," he continues, as if he hasn't even registered her shriek of pain.

"However, there are others…they laugh in the face of death, and run towards it stubbornly, almost as if they want to pass into the afterlife. It is only by chance that these people survive; by luck."

The Courier immediately winces and tries to stand. She can't just sit here and take this, but her knees refuse and she wobbles.

No one catches her as she topples, and she can see Vulpes scowl at her.

"You walked into this situation doing the latter, but perhaps that was your miserable arrogance, hmm?" He kicks her in the side, and she wheezes for precious air as she falls yet again. He chuckles darkly, and the soldiers around him follow his example.

"This is your last second chance, degenerate." he seethes into her ear, and she shrinks back, repulsed and frightened. She moves her head to stare at the ground once again, and it begins to cloud over. Her mind weakens, and the last few connections she has with the world fray as he kicks her twice more, one blow landing across her forehead.

Vulpes moves away and she takes a deep, thankful breath.

As her lungs expand joyfully, one of the Legionnaires suddenly steps forward, and there is pain. Pain in her side, pain in her head, and she feels as if her entire being is leaking into the dirt.

And, in a sense, she is.

ED-E is in a heap beside her. Various wires have been pulled out from his mainframe, the same one she had painstakingly put back together; with a loving, mother's touch. The packages of food she had stored in his hull are spilled across the bloodied ground of Nipton's main road.

The Courier has a hard time distinguishing which streams of blood were from her, or the red that trickled from the only man of Vulpes's that she had been fortunate enough to kill.

With the hand that isn't clutched to her sticky, crimson side, she reaches out. Her fingernails dig into the pavement, and somehow, by the graces of the Mojave gods, she manages to push herself up. For a moment, the night breezes blow around her. Eventually, she scoops ED-E's destroyed and dented form in her arms. Looking towards the valley that Vulpes led his soldiers through, she winces, taking small baby steps. Each time her hips move, the pain in her side increases, twisting and pulling with pain. She feels like sobbing.

Lucky hangs from a loop in her shorts, precariously tilting over the hot pavement, and some of her life force drips down the barrel as she moves forward. Her side feels like it's been set on fire.

The ripper had dug a mean ridge from below her armpit; had circle around to just under her left breast. It was shallow, and she was fortunate the Legionnaire hadn't tugged just a little harder. Her ribs would be poking out from the open gash.

She has been stupid.

So, so stupid. Arrogant, too. Her luck has finally run dry.

Several Viper Gang members lie in the road, edges of their skin stained as they brush pools of their own blood. Throwing spears stick out from odd angles in the chests of some, yet others are simply bullet-ridden. She doesn't remember how long she had stayed, kneeling on the ground, or even when her binding had been cut. It must have been long enough for the fighting to go down.

One of the members has obviously wielded a missile launcher. The Courier has to side-step the kicked up asphalt and gaping potholes in the road. She stands over a corpse she almost trips over for a very long time, staring into the face's hauntingly pale, dead eyes, watching a fly flit across the person's mouth.

Suddenly, she's kneeling down in front of the dead Viper. From her heavy combat boots she produces her switchblade, stained with rusty, dried Powder Ganger blood.

With a strangled sob, the switchblade comes down into the Viper's chest; once, twice, and then a dozen times. When she's finished, her head tips forward, settling into her open, bloody palms. She tries to ignore the wet prints of blood she's leaving on her forehead.

She sits there, crumpled against the ground. ED-E rocks back and forth in the cool night wind.

After a few moments of staring at the sky and welling in self-pity, she feels a sting of guilt. She looks down to ED-E, who has only followed her for a day or two, but is the most loyal being she's ever come across. The guilt rises, forming a knot in her throat until she chokes out a strangle sob.

She curls her petite body around the eyebot, shielding him from particles of dust and sand that can blow into his main circuits and fry him beyond repair.

This is where the caravan finds her the next morning, bleeding into the road.


She wakes up in a bed. A real, honest to God bed – with sheets, a mattress, and a pillow. She buries her face into the dirty, torn plump of down, and finds herself struggling against a knot of hysterics that wells up in the back of her throat. Eventually, she turns her head to the side, and stares at the heap of scrap that was – is – ED-E. She scoots to the edge of the bed and runs her hand along the grates at ED-E's front, dusting off the dirt that has settled there.

The knot in her throat tightens, and she pats his metal hull sadly before looking around the room. It is a Pre-War hotel room, and she admires at the old, tattered framed paintings that hang on the walls before she stands and searches the room.

When she has a hold on her knapsack, she zips it open and begins shoveling everything she can reach into it. Abraxo from the bathroom, a few empty bottles of Nuka, five or six caps on the nightstand, and another suspicious bottle of pills she finds stored in a footlocker under the bed.

In a toolbox behind the broken bathtub, there are seven pieces of scrap metal she can use for repairing her weapons, including a new fission battery sitting under a pile of cables. The Courier pushes these into her knapsack too, before throwing it on the old spring mattress and looking around the room for her clothes.

When she finally spots them, she realizes they are damp, and have been, by the Mojave's standards, "washed". A dark red spot on the left side of her shirt suddenly reminds her of the wound, and she lifts the rest of the camisole hanging on her shoulders to stare at it.

It is worse than she originally thought. The wound is deep, but at least now it has makeshift stitches that peek out from the tight off-white bandages wrapped around her torso. Blood is beginning to soak through the layers, and she gives her torso an experimental twist. It hurts, but the stitches hold tight.

She throws on the off-white stained tank top, her long-sleeved brown jacket, and the shorts.

Her socks have been strung out above the bed, hanging from the fan on the ceiling that stopped working long ago. She pulls them down, and then she puts her heavy boots on, testing the ankle one of the Legionnaires stomped on before retreating after his leader.

It hurts like hell, and she suddenly feels like punching something. Her anger is returning, so she lets loose a string of colorful curses. That relieves some of the emotional strain.

Throwing her knapsack over one shoulder, the Courier tucks her eyebot companion under her right arm, trying to ignore the pain of her side. She throws open the main room's only door, guessing it's the exit.

When her eyes adjust to the bright sunlight streaming onto her face from the sun, she reels her forearm back, ready to throw a punch at any hostile face. Just as she is about to blindly let go of her anger and apprehension, an old woman steps in front of her. She raises an eyebrow, judging the raised fist in front of her face.

With a curse and a surprised gasp, the Courier drops her hand, gazing back at the woman. Neither says anything for a few seconds, and she takes the opportunity to check her surroundings.

In front of her, the large scaled back of an olive-green dinosaur rises on the horizon. She looks down between her feet and notices she is on the second floor of a motel. Looking left, she realizes her room is the last at the top floor. Past the railings is an abandoned gas station, and a few Pre-War houses that stand proudly in the distance, relatively unharmed and whole. To her right, there is a half circle of small shacks.

She supposes these were once private rooms, before the bombs dropped. Now they must be entire houses to people. In the distance, New Vegas sparkles in the early-morning sunlight, and the peak of its highest casino is easily visible.

The urge to run out of the town and sprint into the city as fast as possible is still there, but…it's impossible for her right now.

Instead of pondering her dilemma longer, the Courier drops her bright green eyes to the short elderly woman in front of her, and tilts her head.

"Where in the fuck am I?"

The old woman grins, and mockingly tips an imaginary top hat on her head.

"Welcome to Novac, ma'am. We're almost as popular as New Vegas." The sarcasm practically drips off her words.