Hey everyone, it seems like only a few people are still regularly reading my chapters, so leave a review if you're still around! I'd rather not write for characters whose submitters aren't around anymore, if you understand my mentality on that.
For this chapter, I'm going to do in story arcs instead of character sections. You'll see what I mean when the chapter starts.
Section One Arc: Finding Jack
The hotel had only one bed, since they didn't want to spend any more money. Elizabeth was still asleep, but Quasar was lying awake in his boxers, staring at the ceiling. He was drowsy yet determined, and he wanted to get out as early as possible to find out what he could about the attack on Whitney's. "Elizabeth, wake up." He nudged her with an elbow and she rolled onto her side.
She mumbled something and sat up.
"Did you dream of electric sheep?" Quasar joked.
She gave a light laugh, but then she groaned and rubbed her eyes. "Is it 4 in the morning?"
He was already shuffling into his pants, and she rolled out of bed in groggy discomfort. "Quasar," she said, and he looked at her, pants half on, and raised an eyebrow.
"How good are you at breaking into things? Terminals?" Quasar asked, getting his pants over his hips.
"Before we break the town's laws, how about we go to the diner and ask people about it? Whitney's isn't far from her, so I bet you somebody knows something."
"Right," said Quasar. "But we have to go back to Whitney's after that. They had security cameras, so there's probably a terminal with access to those."
"No problem," Elizabeth agreed.
They sat for a moment of silence, and then Quasar said, "After 113, are you going to stick around?"
She put on her own pants. "You want me around?"
"You know how quasars are the brightest thing in the universe?"
"Sure."
"Well, given that I am practically iridescent, may I suggest that you are the one who wants me around?"
Elizabeth slipped her jacket over her shoulders and then said, "You may not."
"I radiate light."
"You sure radiate something."
Quasar opened purified water and took a swig, and Elizabeth drank from her water bottle.
"That radiation filtering implant is a good trick," he said. "You could eat raw radscorpion if you wanted."
"I definitely do not want," she responded.
"While we're talking about things you may or may not want," Quasar began. "How attracted to me are you?"
Elizabeth choked a little bit on what she was drinking and then looked at him. Quasar had a friendly face with medium length black hair and well-kept stubble, and a scar she didn't think she'd noticed before. It ran from his chin to the left side of his lips, and another scar right above one of his green eyes.
His elbow sleeve shirt fit him nicely, and he looked young and handsome, which she had obviously noticed before. "From one to ten," he added. He put his baseball cap on.
"Aren't we supposed to be going on a mission?" she inquired. She stepped past him to go grab her belt, but he stepped to the side, turned around, and had her up against a wall. He courteously left enough room for her to slip past him if she really wanted to, but she stayed against the wall facing him.
"This is an equally important mission."
"Can you take anything seriously?"
"I'm taking this seriously."
"We have to find Jack, big guy." Elizabeth placed a pointer finger against his chest. "You were ready to break into Whitney's four seconds ago."
"We're definitely about to go out," agreed Quasar. "But one to ten first."
"Well, you're a bit of a dick," Elizabeth commented.
"If you don't love it we can go find Jack right now."
"Well, it's surprisingly not the worst. How about we find Jack and if we make it through everything alive, we can talk about it?"
"So, yes, in a word? You do think I'm incredibly sexy?"
Elizabeth pushed Quasar back lightly with her finger. "I have a terminal to hack into."
He watched her cross the room and put her plasma pistol into the back of her pants. She got the rest of her things together, and he sighed and leaned against the wall.
"Ready to go?" she asked.
"You bet."
Jack was wearing a jumpsuit, and they gave him a pickaxe, which he knew was a rather bad idea, since he could take out at least two slavers with the pickaxe before they subdued him. "What am I mining?" he asked Joanna.
"You're scraping subway parts from the 6 train," she informed him.
Jack thought about this for a little bit, and then said, "Who are you with? Just regular slavers?"
"Don't talk," responded Joanna.
"I have a friend," Jack told her. "An institute scientist who can jury rig this entire operation to explode."
"He sounds like he'd make a good slave," Joanna responded.
Jack made a note to himself that he'd enjoy breaking out and killing her. Joanna pulled out a shotgun. Jack's shotgun, and suddenly he was furious.
"It would be poetic if I shot you with your own gun."
Almost as poetic as me killing you with this pickaxe, Jack thought to himself.
Elizabeth was fiddling with a terminal in the basement of Whitney's. They passed by dead bodies on their way down, still relatively fresh from the night before.
The terminal whirred as she guessed the password, and she started scrolling through the files.
"Are you finding anything?" Quasar asked her.
"Yes, I'm going to pull it up right now."
A tinted video of Whitney's entrance popped up on the screen, and they watched a throng of men flood in and shoot the guard. Elizabeth paused the video. "What is that?" She zoomed in on a symbol on one of the men's jackets.
"What is what?" The symbol was a faded E surrounded by a circle of stars, and Quasar said, "That's the Enclave."
"What is the Enclave doing at Whitney's?" Elizabeth asked him.
"Can you make the audio louder?"
She did, and they couldn't make out much, but one of the men said, "6 train," and another said "113."
"Which 6 train stop is the closest to Vault 113?" Quasar asked quickly.
Elizabeth scratched her head and shut the terminal down. "Astor place?"
"Then that's where we're going to start," he announced. "We're getting Devich back."
Jack shoved a piece of scrap electronics into his front pocket. It looked just sharp enough to kill a man, but not sharp enough to poke him or poke through his shirt.
Joanna walked up to him, Jack's shotgun in hand. "Nice job, Newbie," she told him. She gave him a hearty pat on a back like an aunt would do her nephew. "Maybe you'll buy your freedom one day."
He cocked his head. "It's only been two days," Jack told her.
"You're a big strong boy," she responded.
"That's not what I meant," he said. "I meant it's been two days out of four. I was going to kill you in two days, but I figured I'd just do it now." He slipped the sharp scrap metal from his pocket and jammed it as close to Joanna's carotid artery as he could get, but he overshot by an inch and she raised the gun up in panic. He dodged and grabbed the pickaxe from her, but the bullet grazed his thigh. He swung the pickaxe as hard as he could at her, and she got off one more shot, this time deeper into his thigh. They fell together.
His leg began to spurt blood, and Joanna was dead. He pressed his hands against his leg, trying to shove cloth into the wound, but he felt the spurting against his hand.
He heard shouting from a corridor, and realized that they were about to find him and let him bleed out.
He didn't know whether to be surprised or not when Quasar came bolting into the opening with his shishkebab in hand.
Elizabeth followed close behind, firing plasma into stray slavers. She sped up her jog when she saw Jack, whipping out a stimpak and stabbing his leg with it.
"I had it," Jack said.
"You know," Quasar huffed, breathless from tearing through slavers, "You had a bullet in your leg and only half of a brain, apparently." He gave Jack's good leg a kick. "Devich Devich, you have to recant this death wish you seem to have."
Jack huffed and then flinched when he felt his leg start to stitch itself back together. "What kind of stimpak is this?"
"An experimental one?" Elizabeth scanned the room for more hostiles.
"Elizabeth knows her biology," Quasar said, not pretending to hide an innuendo.
"It's more of, well, biochemistry or medical physics…" Elizabeth mumbled.
"Well, it works," Jack old her. "Thanks." He pushed himself to his feet and pulled his shotgun out of Joanna's hands. "I'm going to free the slaves here; it's a small compound, and there are only around six more."
They freed the rest of the extremely thankful slaves, and the last one they freed was a ghoul. The ghoul was short with rotten and burnt flesh and a wiry gray beard of curly hairs. He had remnants of old tattoos crisscrossed on his skin, and his eyes were brown and sharp.
He looked Quasar up and down and raised the skin above his eye, which would have been an eyebrow if he still had them. "Are you a joke?" he asked after a minute.
"Yes," Quasar responded.
"You did a number on those slavers," the ghoul said. "Let me guess? Trigger happy young men with a penchant for sticking their dicks in things?" He gestured to Quasar and Jack.
"I think you have it all wrong," Quasar offered. "Here's a crash course in close combat: my shishkebab has no trigger. It's a sword. Swords don't shoot."
The ghoul rolled his eyes. "A smartass too, I see. And you." He pointed at Elizabeth. "You look about as exciting as an excel document, not that you know what that is."
"Excel is great if you know where the equals sign is on your terminal," Quasar retorted, and Elizabeth gave a sheepish shrug, as a cross between, 'sorry' and 'excel documents are great'. Quasar laughed out loud and said, "You would like excel, wouldn't you?"
"Can you merry band of delinquents move aside?" the ghoul asked. "I have a couple places to be that aren't here." He pushed past Jack, who scowled.
"Hey, what's your name?" Quasar called.
"Gordon," the ghoul grunted back, and it was enough for Quasar.
Section Two: Encounters
Svetlana Bishop was unarguably one of the most intimidating people in the room, this she knew for sure. James knew it too. He was kicked back, flipping through one of the books from The Strand, while Svetlana was putting the owner of a general store through somewhat of an interrogation. "Have you seen this man?" she demanded, thrusting a photo of the elusive Javael Evans into the shopkeeper's face.
"Yes!" His voice cracked. "He was going down to Vault 113! He's, he's, well, he's probably there. I saw him a day ago, and the Vault is close!"
Svetlana withdrew the photo. Her hair was out of a bun, and it was shoulder length and black. "Fine," she said. "Let's go," she said to James, who grinned and stood to follow her.
They walked outside and Svetlana nearly slammed into a passerby.
"Jeez," the man said. "Is it lonely up there?" Svetlana looked down at the man and frowned at his skin and wispy beard. Her frown encompassed his tattoos, his height, and the fact that he was a ghoul.
"No more lonely than a pile of meat such as yourself would be."
"What, you don't like ghouls? Well, sometimes you smoothskins aren't that pleasant either." He was wearing a grubby t-shirt, and this clothes were leather padded. His neck was craned up so he could see her face.
"You should probably get out of the lady's way," James suggested helpfully.
"I'll go any damn way I please," the ghoul, Gordon, informed both James and Svetlana. "After 250 years people you don't ever get any less prejudiced." He shook his head.
Svetlana made a move to strike Gordon, and was caught off guard when he countered it perfectly.
"Is this what's happening, lady? Are you fighting me because you're too proud to walk around me?" Gordon planted his back foot on the ground and put most of his weight on it, assuming a kicking-based tae Kwan do stance.
"She's fighting you because you're difficult and she has a knack for killing. Also, she's a lot smarter than you. Consider this a 'purging' of the wastes," suggested James. "Tell me when it's over, Svet." He lifted his hat and fixed his hair. "I'll be in the general store."
They were equally agile; Gordon was throwing kicks and she was trying to counter, but neither of them could hit the other. He changed to Tai Chi, trying to push away her aggressive strikes, but the man in black hadn't been lying when he told Gordon she was smart.
Any style change he made she read the second it happened. He wondered if she could read a style she had never seen before, and mixed it up until he was using the odd tribal village's style, which they invented themselves.
He got one hit to her side, and she stumbled, but managed a kick to his leg. She was stronger than he had given her credit for, and he was immediately in pain. He pretending to fall back, but really assumed a style of 'drunken kung fu' that gave the impression of an unbalanced stance.
When Svet took this opening, he shifted to the side and managed to hit her back, right in her kidney. She stumbled and turned around, whipping her arm into Gordon's nose, which cracked under the pressure and began to spurt blood. It dripped into his mouth and he spit it out quickly.
He lunged, using all of his weight to bring her to the ground with ju jitsu. He tried to get on top of her to slip a leg around her arm so he could dislocate her shoulder, but she used torque to throw him off, back onto his feet.
"You put up a good fight for a smoothskin," he huffed.
"You're an adept fighter for a zombie," she huffed back. "This was fun. You should go."
"Go? Just like that? Well, you were the best fight I've had since that Deathclaw... See you, smoothskin."
"Maybe some other time, brain-eater."
Gordon chuckled, and Svetlana may have smiled, but nobody saw.
Section Three: Jonathan and Dante, short conversation
Dante was doing pushups. Jonathan found the younger man's indefatigable energy both refreshing and entertaining. Dante was determined and trying to find purpose, something Jonathan admired and related to.
Jonathan was still starting anew from when he left the desert rangers, and in a way he realized that Dante was helping him. This young man had found a way to reclaim himself after leaving the NCR, and Jonathan figured he could find a way too. Plus, he liked Dante.
Dante was reckless and loud, and Jonathan was observant and quiet, and he thought it worked out nicely.
"Dante," said Jonathan. "When did you become a ranger?"
"I was seventeen," Dante said in between sit ups, having rolled over from his pushups. "The youngest ranger ever."
"That's young," agreed Jonathan. "How close did you ever come to the legion?"
"Yeah. They're more or less why I quit," Dante stopped his routine and took a swig of water. "The legion captured me and the NCR barely noticed."
"That's why I left the rangers too," said Jonathan. "Because I figured once we were NCR, we would become a little less individual. Somebody would forget about us at some point."
"Well, here's to making a name for ourselves." Dante raised his purified water.
Jonathan was cleaning his weapon, but he stopped to raise a bullet. "What comes after Javael?"
"I want to buy a house," said Dante. "I haven't lived somewhere in a long time."
"That's not a bad idea," said Jonathan. "Maybe I'll join one of New York's groups. I was going to look for the New York Railroad."
"Hey, maybe I'll see you around after this," said Dante.
"Maybe."
