WHY HAS THIS TAKEN ME SO LONG?
IT IS A MYSTERY.
*hearts* for all of you.
"Cazadores," said Verity.
"Yes," said Borous proudly.
"And nightstalkers."
"Also yes."
"You asshole." Verity said. "You are the new 'worst person I've ever met'. And I've met some pretty terrible people." She paused. "I don't feel like I'm angry enough. Why am I not more angry?"
"The pacification field," Borous supplied helpfully. "It was designed to inhibit violent hormonal impulses. And I am delighted to see how well it is working!"
"What about deathclaws?" she asked. "Did you make deathclaws?"
He hovered uncertainly. "A death… claw? Who named that?"
"I don't know." She rubbed at her forehead. A headache was developing just behind her eyes, and from the pain that was just beginning to radiate out in spikes, it was going to be a big one. "It's like a huge lizardy thing. Claws and teeth and shit. Fast. Big."
"It sounds like it may have had somemilitary application," Borous mused. "I think – I remember a conference, once." He sounded almost confused. "I… presented a paper, and then afterward spoke to a man working on… working on what?" The lights of his tank flickered furiously. "Working on units that could be deployed in areas with large populations. Resistant to damage and highly effective in weakening opposition to invasion. Effective against military targets, too. I knew that sounded familiar. Deathclaw. Ha."
Verity squinted at him through the haze of her headache. "So you guys specifically created things to slaughter as many people as possible? That's great."
"Not people," Borous corrected. "Communists."
"Jesus-fucking-Christ," she said. "Maybe the fucking bombs were actually a good thing."
"It certainly provided us with a scope for innovation that may not have otherwise been possible. No civil rights lawyers, no ethicists to interfere."
"You're a monster," she said.
"If that's the way you feel," he said huffily. "Then I'll remove the dog armour prototype you asked for from the store in your quarters."
"Oh," she said. "Sorry. Um, no? You're very smart. And… better than… everyone."
"Of course!" he said. "And it's about time you realised it."
She sighed. "So. Dog armour?"
"Available to you upstairs."
The lighting in the sink sent a pulsating throb through her head, and she asked one of the lightswitches to change it to that soothing pink. It didn't help much. She licked her dry lips and sat down on the floor in front of the central unit. A fresh lance of pain bloomed behind her eyes as she looked into the neon glow.
"Christ," she said, indistinctly. "Is med-x good for headaches?"
"No!" exclaimed the stealth suit. "It dilates blood vessels, which is likely to make headaches a lot worse!"
"Oh." Her shoulders slumped. "Well, it can't hurt to try, right?"
"I believe that sentence is inconsistent with my previous statement," the suit said carefully.
Verity's laugh came out sounding more like a rattle. "Yeah," she said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "Right. Um. Okay. What about buffout?"
The suit didn't reply.
Verity grinned. "So… buffout's good?"
"It has an anti-inflammatory effect that may prove to be beneficial." The stealth suit sounded reluctant.
"Good shit," she said, ignoring the murmured complaint of the stealth suit, and swallowed a handful while logging on to the store function of the central unit. She scrolled down until she found the armour.
"Seriously?" she asked. "Sixty thousand caps? Who would pay that much for dog armour?"
"That is the number Dr. Borous priced it at, sir," the central intelligence unit replied calmly.
"Well what the fuck is his problem?" she snarled.
"He did mention something about armchair psychologists," the unit offered apologetically.
"For fuck's sake." Verity rolled her eyes. "Fine. I'm going to have to sell you like half my shit to afford it, but fine. Don't get rid of it, because I'm going to come back here with all the proton axes and superheated saturnite fists ever. Got it?"
"Very good, sir."
Verity wasn't particularly good at drawing, even without the crippling headache. She was trying to draw simple objects in chalk on the blackboard to illustrate what she was talking about, but her attempt at a toaster looked more like a child's drawing of a boxy house. She stood back and glared at it, tempted to wipe the whole thing off the board and start again.
She'd just finished explaining that ovens wouldn't work if they weren't hooked up to gas mains, and before that was getting the lobotomites to help her move all the bits of dead people lying around out of the cave. That had worried her on its own, though; what else did they have left to eat? She could bring them all the old world food supplies she could find, but they wouldn't last forever
But one of the lobotomites pointed over to the shrine in the corner of the cave, and she put the chalk down with a smile.
Verity hadn't been able to figure out the toaster shrine. She assumed that the lobotomites had arranged the toasters in a sort of shrine because they were familiar and simple and comforting. But the black candles and skulls looked like they'd been placed intentionally, which would have taken far more sophistication than she'd seen in any of them so far.
"Okay," she said. "So, this is a toaster. Say 'toaster'."
The lobotomites, seated cross-legged on the cave floor in front of her, were silent.
"Right," she said, and pointed at one of them. "You say toaster."
The lobotomite she'd selected looked down at the ground.
Her heart sank. This was pointless. How had she thought she'd be able to come in here, draw a few lines on the blackboard, and somehow magically restore their intelligence and personality and memories and everything else that they'd lost?
"That's okay," she said, keeping her voice level by the barest of degrees. "So, what a toaster does-"
"Burn," said a lobotomite.
"What?" she asked.
"Fire," said another of them.
"Destroy," said a third.
"Okay, what the fuck." She took a step back, her hand started reaching for the pistol at her hip of its own volition.
The lobotomites' eyes seemed to be glowing with fervour in the dim light.
She began to edge towards the door, but they followed her. She wished desperately that she hadn't left Gabe back at the Dome – despite the protection that he could give, she'd thought he was too erratic and aggressive to be brought around large groups of people who could themselves be very unpredictable.
She started walking faster, heart racing, but the lobotomites stopped at the shrine. One of them picked up a small case and handed it to her.
"Toaster," he said.
She looked down at the case in her hands. There was a holodisk inside, marked 'toaster' in a scrawled, familiar hand.
"Uh, thanks," she said, shakily. "You guys scared the shit out of me, okay?"
"Okay!" one of them exclaimed cheerfully in response.
"Yeah," she said. "So let's end it here for today."
The flat blue sky outside had never looked so welcoming.
She strapped the pieces of armour onto Gabe carefully, making sure not to pinch his skin or catch his hair between the plates. The assembly diagram that had come with it seemed to be hastily-drawn-up and wasn't particularly useful, but she managed to get the plates into position without too much difficulty. The armour was fairly simple, made up of a number of carbon fibre plates that fit around his cyberdog plating; protecting his neck, braincase, and flanks while leaving his legs free. There was even a place on the neckpiece to mount the cyberdog gun so it could be rotated while mounted.
She reached up to give Gabe a scratch behind his ear. "Good boy!" she said. "I've got some… uh, hamburger stuff. Should really feed you something better, but there's not much in the way of wildlife out here other than nightstalkers and cazadores, and I'm fairly sure they're both poisonous. And no eating the lobotomites, okay? They're friends now."
He gulped down the meat she put in front of him.
"Good boy," she said. "Now, down."
He whined.
"What?"
He whined again.
"Is it chems?" she asked. "I'm pretty sure I shouldn't give you any more, I don't know how chems work on dogs." She stood back. "I guess you've got a lot of muscle mass, though. And god, I know how withdrawals suck. Buffout?"
He growled.
"I'm not giving you psycho. Seriously, that stuff is bad shit. I don't even like it. And I can't give you jet, because – well, you're a dog, you kind of need person lips to huff it."
He barked at her once.
"Settle for buffout? Okay. Good boy." She handed over two pills, which were lapped up eagerly by his huge wet tongue.
He settled himself on the ground, and she climbed onto his back with some difficulty, grasping at the cracks in between plates to pull herself up.
She settled low over Gabe's shoulders as he ran, one hand on the mounted cyberdog gun, as they headed north. They passed the Forbidden Zone dome, with its bright lights and huge entranceway, and began to wind into the maze of narrow pathways that cut through the rock.
They slowed as they came to a mass of thick vines, hanging low between the two sheer faces of the walls on either side of them. The rest of the crater was dry and dead, she didn't think she'd seen another thing growing the entire time she'd been here.
Gabe moved slowly and silently, and Verity had to grip on hard to stay in place against the swing of his slow walk. As they got closer, she could see that they were approaching a destroyed building, a set of narrow steps leading up to what used to be the entrance.
She heard a thick liquid splat, and tapped on Gabe's neck to get him to stop. She looked around carefully for the slightest sign of movement for almost a minute before seeing it.
The spitter plants. Again. She saw one swaying gently, almost gracefully, as if in a breeze. It reared back to spit again, but Gabe sent a sonic blast towards it that knocked the jaws off the stem. A rustling noise coming from the ruined complex seemed to surround them as the plant fell to the ground.
She climbed down off Gabe, uneasily, giving him a pat as she slipped to the ground. The destroyed building was marked as X-22, and had long ago crumbled against the burrowing roots and climbing vines, flowers blooming wildly, bright and exotic. Snakelike tendrils wound around the broken shell of the building.
This is where it had started, then. Vault 22. She sneered. Some long-dead Vault-Tec employee had a fucking sense of humour.
A flicker of movement in the building above her caught her eye, but was gone before she could focus on it.
The eerie whisper of the plants as they moved seemed to echo in the narrow valley. She could hear a low growl coming from Gabe's throat behind her. She left the huge cyberdog gun where it was and drew her pistol.
She was halfway up the steps when the stealth suit spoke. "Really?" it asked. "Alone?"
She hesitated. "I just wanna see what's up there," she whispered. "I don't know, if there are any lab notes or anything. Plants grow really well around these things, we might be able to bring the lobotomites up here and they wouldn't have to live in their shitty old cave, but I don't want to take them here if they're just going to get sick and turn into plant people."
"Why don't you come back later with some lobotomites, then?" the suit asked hopefully. "You don't have to do everything for them by yourself. This place looks tough."
Verity squinted up at the ruins. "It'd probably go better if I had a flamethrower or something," she admitted.
"So why don't we leave now and go prepare?"
The vines around her seemed to be listening to her intently. "I could do that," she said uneasily, and turned and began to walk down the stairs again.
Something hard hit her from behind, and she fell headlong down the stairs, landing in a dazed heap with all the air knocked out of her lungs. She could feel something slicing at her back and head, and struggled to get up, but she was pushed back down again.
The suit was trying to say something, but she couldn't hear it over the ringing in her ears. She felt a pinprick and then the pain vanished. She managed to kick back and hit something solid, but it didn't seem to do much damage, only pausing for a second. It was just enough for Verity to wriggle around and fire her pistol three times, hitting the spore carrier in its mossy green chest. It began to leak clear fluid out of the bullet wounds. It looked down for a second, made a rattling noise, and leaped towards her again. She emptied the last two bullets in the clip into the spore carrier without much effect, then threw her arms up in front of her face to protect herself.
It never hit. She heard a loud crunching noise, and lowered her arms to see Gabe tearing into the monster viciously, the boneless form lying prone on the ground, missing a leg and leaking more of the clear sap into the dirt.
"Thought I told you not to do that," she said to the stealth suit as she began to hunt through her bag for stimpaks.
"Sorry," it said. "It's in my programming to administer med-x once past a particular threshold regardless of the wearer's expressed wishes."
Verity winced. "My headache's back."
"Sorry," the suit said again. At least she sounded genuine. Verity rolled her eyes.
Gabe gave a yelp and started to lick his paws, trying to get the taste out of his mouth. Verity opened a bottle of water from her bag and tipped it into his mouth.
"Good boy," she murmured. "Don't worry, it's not bad for you." She looked up at the research centre again. "So yeah. Better prep-"
A thunderous explosion obliterated the rest of her sentence, deafening her. She looked around wildly – it had seemed so close – and finally caught sight of a plume of thick black smoke back in the direction she'd come from.
"Think we should check that out?" she asked.
"Cautiously?" pleaded the suit.
Gabe barked happily.
"Alright then," she said. "Let's go."
OOPS ALSO: HAPPY BIRTHDAY FALLOUT NEW VEGAS (slightly late)