AN: Yes! The first chapter in I think months has come! It's a bit shoddy yes, but woo! New chapter! And I've deleted the letter chapter because you guys don't need it anymore SINCE I AM CLEARLY BACK.

I have lots more motivation and am planning to definitely move forward some more. Thanks to all of you who waited, the story will get loads better (I hope!) in the next chapters. Love for all of you!

|Chapter 24 - Rivet City in a Nutshell|

"You want a private audience with Madison Li?"

"Umm... yes, sir. If that's all right."

The security guard named Harkness stood in front of her and Charon, blocking the way to the bulkheads that would lead them to the inner bowels of the ship. He didn't look very happy to see them at all. Even the assistant security guards scrutinized the duo, lined up behind Harkness and staring them down. For being the first people she met of Rivet City, she hoped that the others weren't as icy and intimidating as them.

"What makes you so special that you think you can just waltz on in here and ask the time of day with our lead scientist? Who are you?" She could feel Charon tense up behind her again. In fact, she wondered if he hadn't stopped being tense since catching up with Lyons.

"I'm not special, no, not like a trader or anything, sir. But I was told that my father came here. About five eleven, graying black hair, in his mid forties? British accent, probably unshaven? Maybe wearing a lab coat and a jumpsuit like mine?" At the look of the man about to immediately belt out a no, she spoke up again, "I was told he knew Madison Li personally. His name was James Adler, if that could do anything for you?"

Immediately, the man's eyes grew a tad larger and he opened his mouth, seemingly shocked by what she said. "So... you're that man's daughter..." He mumbled almost incoherently, before softening his glare. "Look, I do remember him coming by but I don't know if he's still here or if he's left. He came around about two days ago, and I had a lot of work on my hands so I'm sorry that I don't know much else. I'll escort you inside, but I would check with Madison's assistants before speaking with her yourself. Just to make sure you won't stress her out by showing up unexpectedly and drilling her with questions. She has a tendency to get very unreasonable if she feels put on the spot."

"Thank you very much, Mister Harkness," she sighed, pleased, and he nodded and turned. The assistant guards stepped aside and let them pass by without a problem. Alma didn't try to smile her thankfulness to them. She felt uncomfortable enough as it was under their eyes. They were suspicious. Even the man before them strode to a left-hand bulkhead stiffly, and didn't utter a sound as he pulled it open. A metallic, somewhat musky smell hit her nostrils and she grimaced; she hoped the rest of the ship didn't smell the same, or she'd be nursing a migraine soon.

The security guard led them across the stairwell to another bulkhead, and as it opened, she caught the sight of two children sprinting right for them. One was a brunette girl with a bob cut, and the other a boy seemingly too big for his clothes, and both were too absorbed in whatever game they were playing to notice the three of them in the doorway.

"C.J.," Harkness began to scold, "what did I tell you abou-". She noticed him at the last minute. With a tiny squeal of surprise, the little girl smacked herself into the man before them. The boy, too, couldn't control himself and stumbled into Harkness as well. Alma looked on with intrigue; he hadn't even swayed from the kids' tumble into him. With a gruff sigh, he bent over and easily picked them up by the collars of their shirts and set them back on their feet. "Both of you would be in a lot of trouble if I had been in the mood to yell at little kids. Next time you two feel like running around the halls, go to the market instead where at least if you fall, you won't slam your heads into bulkheads or break your shins on metal piping."

The little girl looked resentful as she nodded her head, and the boy too shook his head sulkily, "Yessir, Mister Harkness sir," they said in unison. Alma bit her lip a little bit when the girl's eyes strayed past Harkness and met hers. Immediately, the girl lost her feelings of guilt and beamed, pointing to her and her bodyguard, "Mister Harkness! Who are those people? Ooh, who's that weird looking guy behind that girl?"

Harkness emitted a groan and waved his hand slightly. "They're nothing important, C.J. Here for a little business and I'm just showing them the way. Now please, let us by." The little girl grabbed the boy by the wrist and both of them backed up and out of the way, their eyes fixed on Alma and Charon. She smiled and waved somewhat; C.J. returned the gesture feverishly, but the boy simply sneered and turned his attention back to Charon, his mouth opening to say something she expected would have Charon hating him for days. "Oh, and James," Harkness turned to glare at the child, and he immediately looked to the man, "don't get into any trouble with Flak and Shrapnel; they're at wit's end with you sneaking ammo out of their store. I already confiscated your stash, too. Don't think we haven't got our eyes on you, boy." The boy groaned and turned away, his hand immediately twisting around and latching to C.J.'s wrist instead. The two marched out of the hall, and Harkness continued their walk to the bulkhead across the way.

When it opened, the smell of the large room was much different. It was light and airy, and the sound of machines whirring filled the air. Harkness aimed a finger at the middle of the room to a blond woman seeming to argue with an older man, "That's Janice Kaplinski. Talk with her about Madison. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a city to watch over."

"Thank you Harkness," Alma said, and he simply turned and left the room. The tense feeling around Charon eased up, and as she stepped down the staircase, she could feel him distance himself from her and give her space. Perhaps all of that intensity was simply because he had never been to Rivet City. Or maybe he was a little claustrophobic, was all.

It felt like hours as his smoothskin chatted with the woman named Janice. It was obvious that neither he or the woman wanted anything to do with the others company, but his smoothskin wouldn't let her go. Her question about the fresh fruits and vegetables on the table expanded into a hefty debate on whether or not she would get the chance to speak with Madison Li. At least the girl wasn't whispering to him anymore about the strange old coot in the corner of the room; moments before, the Janice smoothskin had been shouting at him about what true science was or some bullshit. That alone had made Alma go into a frenzy about her own ideas on science. It had been mortifying to let her go on and on and on...

But quite simply, Charon did not like Rivet City. It was dark and cold, smelled like dirty people and stale mirelurk meat. He had some vague and ridiculous idea that such a fortified city would be spruced up on the inside, but nope. The people lived in generally the same squalor as any other settlement (omitting Tenpenny of course) did. The only difference was that they were on a boat.

Snowflake, the Underworld hair stylist, would go into a tantrum if asked about Rivet City on his more sober days. "'Real fucked up people in there, As soon as I was ghoulified they made me leave. How the fuck does a hair stylist, of all people, survive outside of a fortified city and make a life for himself? He doesn't; Underworld is the last place I'd fucking be, but here I ended up and your dead skin I gotta trim.'" Of course the man hadn't spoken to him directly, he had been accompanying Ahzrukhal on his weekly visit to Snowflake to keep down his greener flesh from turning into a fiasco and keeping those tufts of hair from falling out. Charon, though he obviously wasn't one for appearances, was pretty satisfied with his own red hair left over from his human days. It didn't look irradiated and disgusting like most ghouls'. But in any case, until Charon met another saintly person like Alma, he would remain convinced the city was nothing special for him or anyone else that had the slightest defect.

"Please, Miss Kaplinski, Madison is the only one who would know, you said it yourself. Please talk to her on my behalf," his smoothskin pleaded, and the woman sighed; ten more minutes of the girl's relentlessness had passed and as far as she was concerned, she was done with it.

"Fine. I'll talk to her. But don't even think that you'll get to speak with her today. And unless you want to sleep in the halls, go to Vera Weatherly on the second floor for a room until then." He watched the woman turn to a clipboard she had left by a pile of ripe tomatoes and pick it up. "Don't bother asking if there's anything to do around here. I spend all of my time here in the hydroponics lab and plus, a room at the hotel will be ten times more interesting than, God, what is there here... the market or the museum or even that damned church. Don't even ask me about the bar," the woman shuddered at the apparent horror of the place, "all of those 'Rivet City Attractions' are nothing special, trust me."

So of course, by lieu of Kaplinski's slight rant about the city, he and Alma were combing through worthless garbage in the market. Or, she was. He stood by her as always, occupying his time by staring at a lawn gnome that somehow found itself on the second floor catwalk while the two of them garnered intrigued looks from the residents. The first store they had come across had been called Potomac Attire, and she had immediately spent ten minutes talking with the owner about fashion of the pre-war era and how to get oil stains out of fleece. After that, she had a conversation with one of the proprietors of Flak N' Shrapnel's about the importance of having a sidearm on hand. Much like when he had tried to convince her to get one, the store owner netted the same result. She simply blew it off as a nuisance and said she had Charon with her anyways, so why bother. The owner obviously looked disappointed at her words, both because he lost a sale and was probably expecting to lose her as a customer due to her ignorance. Charon made a mental note to really get on her hide about it that night as she interrogated a man named Seagrave who ran a store called Rivet City Supply about the broken bow of the ship, and tried to trick the woman heading the chem shop into telling her how the hell she acquired "Ant Queen Pheromones" when the only ant nests his smoothskin knew about were in the wastes. By the time she spent an additional thirty minutes asking the city chef how to make mirelurk taste good for a person who was raised on vault-grade rations, he wished that the smoothskin woman in the lab had never told her of the market and found himself already hating the museum and church.

They spent the rest of the day wandering around the city, his smoothskin chatting it up with the slightly put-off residents and pointing out various little things to him that she took more than a sane interest in. Though, he had to admit he preferred that she enjoyed herself. It was obvious that if her father really was in the city, they would have met up already and talking to Madison would no longer be a necessary evil (since talking to anyone in this damned city was). Charon had a feeling that if he wasn't here, the chances of finding her father were... slim. And the thought of her actually acknowledging that... he wondered what she would do. He knew she seemed to love him, but if he was gone for good, dead or alive, well, he really did not know what would happen. Something told him it wouldn't be pretty.

Yet, of all the places they hung around in and wasted time in, the church had been the most annoying. Not because it was a church in itself; he had been with employers on every side of the religion spectrum and didn't really care for or find annoyance with faith. It was because the priest of the establishment, when asked about the background of Saint Monica whom the church was named after, thoroughly believed this saintly figure was born from a pair of ghouls, yet didn't have any birth defects. It took him all of his strength to not explode on the man right then and there that such things, insemination and birth, were impossible. And by the look on his smoothskin's face when she listened to his sermon, she felt the same way. Suffice to say, they left shortly thereafter, surprisingly without incident. Despite his expectations, she never spoke up about the logical fallacies of the saint's origins, something he knew she had a hard time holding back.

In fact, she remained uncharacteristically silent until that night after buying a hotel room and busting in the door, slinging her pack to the floor, putting her hands on her hips, and staring straight at him as he set down his own bag. "How the hell can he run a church based on such idiocy?" Charon quietly moved her dirtied and overturned bag to the foot of the bed, placing his own pack down as well, "I mean, I understand, it's been two-hundred and something years since the bombs fell and people have to find their faith in something, but a saint said to be born from ghouls? Impossible! I know for a fact that such intense radiation would kill off any sort of fetus or mar it to unrecognizable proportions-"

"Alma, ghouls can't have children, period," he said to hopefully throw off her incoming complaints about birth complications. "And before you ask, male ghouls are incapable of getting female ghouls or humans pregnant, and of course, female ghouls cannot get pregnant period, even if they had sex with a human."

Her silence was a small, somewhat-but-not-enough-to-be-bothersome awkward gift for the rant to follow, "Well despite my ignorance, I still think that it's ridiculous. I mean, do any of the people on this boat believe in this so-called saint? I certainly hope not, because I swear, it took me all of my energy to keep silent when we listened to that sermon of his."

Charon leaned against the wall, arms folded, until she stopped. He didn't want to hear her complain anymore, it was a waste of breath. "What ti-"

"The time? It's ten, Charon, if you must know, it's ten." She was still flustered about the church. He didn't expect her to react so violently about it all, seeing how most of the time she tolerated a lot of strange shit. "And yeah, okay, I'll go to bed. I'll just look forward to Miss Li, that'll calm me for the night." With an inwards smirk, he sat on the floor and crossed his arms to sleep. After she had gotten dressed for bed she asked him if he wanted his own room, but she reminded herself out loud about his contract, which was a first, and then immediately went to sleep. A recollection of the day's events ran through his head. He had to admit, not a day went by with his employer that wasn't interesting to think about. Perhaps he enjoyed her presence more than he thought all this time. Maybe a bit too much, considering his uneasy thoughts about when his contract would be terminated. Of course he hadn't gone to rest until long after she was out, but when he did, the idea of being so close to her father, and what could possibly happen to them, to himself, when they found him, followed his thoughts to his dreams.

"He left."

"You, no, he's gone?"

The woman sighed, tapping the floor with the toe of her pump, "Yes, Alma. He left a couple days ago, right after he showed up here, actually."

"Well do you have any idea where he may have gone?"

She narrowed her eyes, "you aren't possibly planning on going after him? It's a wonder you made it down here, but, to go out into the real wastes..." The determined glare in the girl's eyes proved her reserve would not sway, and she sighed again. "He did mention something about going back to Project Purity. Starting it up again. You know it as the Jefferson Memorial."

Alma felt a desire to arch her eyebrows in intrigue, despite how much she didn't want to talk to the stuffy woman. As soon as she had realized that she was her father's daughter, she had been curt and blunt, as cold as stone. "What's Project Purity?" The woman, seeming to have some strange need to sigh every time she asked a question, did so.

"You already know your father didn't come from the vault," she began, and Alma nodded a bit spitefully. Of course Moriarty had told her when he set eyes on her impressionable, fresh-from-the-vault self, and by the time she had talked with Three Dog, she couldn't help but accept his true origins as fact. But she didn't want to dwell on his lies for now. She needed to know what this thing was and what he could possibly be doing with it. "Well, before you were conceived, before your parents even had an eye for each other, James, myself, your mother, and our friends all had a huge project we were working on in that memorial. Your father, one day, had come up with the radical notion to purify the irradiated waters of the Potomac. Most of the rest of our scientific colleagues wouldn't believe it, and wouldn't help, wouldn't try to get this project started. But something in your father swayed us. We wanted it to happen, it would be the greatest thing we suspected would ever happen to these godforsaken wastes."

"Back then, the Brotherhood of Steel had a huge interest in our project, and helped us construct the labs and machinery in the memorial and would guard it for us while we worked. We toiled night and day to make a purifier strong enough to cleanse all of the water in the bay and river. Tests worked on smaller samples, but the main purifier still had trouble, yet we kept searching for answers. During those times your father took a liking to your mother. If they weren't professionals, they would have been quite all over each other."

"What about the purifier though? What came of it?" She really didn't want to hear of her parents. Not in an intimate or familial way. Not now.

"We began to make headway around the time your mother was pregnant with you. James was working harder than ever and we were so... so close." Li crossed her arms. casting her gaze to the floor for a moment in frustrated silence. Her dark eyes darted back up to her and Alma grimaced, "that is, until you came around." It almost seemed like she was blaming her birth as the reason for everything wrong in the world, the way she said it so venomously. "When you were born, when your mother died... that's when all work on the project stopped. James didn't want to bother with it anymore. All he had was you, and he didn't want you out in the wastes. He was too blind to see all of the people who believed in him were crushed when he left. To take you to that vault. Like he promised he'd never let a loved one die like that again. And with him gone, we lost our hope and motivation. And the Brotherhood too. It became dangerous to be out there without protection and nothing to work for, of course. Came back to the city and furthered our studies in hydroponics. We never heard from him again in these last nineteen years. Not until now."

"He wants to start Project Purity back up again..." Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw a somewhat-frazzled Charon burst through a bulkhead and make a beeline for her. She almost forgot that she had left the room early for this.

Madison nodded, a small amused grin on her lips. "Yes, yes, he came in demanding help or something from us to start it. But we can't just leave the lab, not after all we've done and have yet to do. I won't stop my work so quickly nowadays, as you can imagine."

Charon was at her side in almost a blink of an eye, radiating hostility and annoyance, "so he's there? In the memorial? I can find him there?"

This time, the sigh was sympathetic. "I'm not sure. That's where he said he was going. I don't know where else he could be, but you're never sure. It's dangerous there, overrun by super mutants. If he's there, it might have just been suicide."

"Well, I'm going to find him. Dead or not." She said affirmatively, and Li looked stunned for a moment. "I have a lot of things to discuss with him, I need to find him."

Madison shook her head slightly, and eyed the both of them. Alma could see her dark eyes scanning over the two of them. Judging, observing. "I can't go with you of course... But I wish you luck, and no harm on your father or yourself. Despite everything, I still respect him. Give him my regards if he lives, and my prayers if not. I'm sorry I can't help you further." With that, Alma said her goodbyes to the woman and the others who had been eavesdropping. Her search for her father wouldn't end until she found him herself. Charon made no objections (or at least didn't hint at them) as they set out for the memorial, leaving the safety of the carrier behind. Before they would actually step foot inside, she planned on asking Charon to teach her any additional lessons in the art of firearms. Though she was certain she would fare much better than back in Germantown, she needed to be assured by someone other than herself.

The sun was still just peaking over the horizon of the morning as the two marched silently to the infested memorial, guns loaded and nerves set on the impending threat of death.

"Miss?" Charon's voice was a welcoming thing to hear after her talk with Li. It made her smile.

"Oh, yes, Charon?"

"May I ask that you please never leave your room without informing me ever again?"

She almost laughed. What a silly thing to ask. She was safe in the city anyways, but she decided to humor him. "Sure thing."

"No. I am serious. Don't do that. Ever." His voice was hollow and angered. And a trace of something else was in it. He both frightened her by how angry he sounded and piqued her interest at what else his voice was trying to imply but his words clearly weren't.

"... Okay, I'm sorry for that. I hope you weren't upset for that little blunder earlier?" He didn't respond. Or talk again until they reached the catwalks surrounding the front of the memorial, hunkering down behind a pile of rubble and re-checking their guns as a mutant, their first target, loomed further above. Maybe he was a little more bothered than she thought. No worries, all hostility toward her would leave soon and be directed at the green giants that lumbered along the catwalks.

... Right?