"YOU BLEW IT UP! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!" I screamed myself horse in my first few moments in this hellscape being X had decided to throw me. My frustration had a dual nature to it. Just moments before I found myself looking out across this dilapidated hellscape. One of X's most fervent psychopaths had fed her near infinite magical power into the type 95 computation device. The very same device I had been filling with my own not insignificant power.

I remember being dumbfounded for a moment before feeling absolutely nothing, then this. I was in a ditch staring up at a muddy yellow sky. There was a red tint to things and it took me a moment to work out that what I was seeing was blood pooling in my left eye. I quickly rolled onto my side and blinked a few times as I moved a little to make sure I still had all my limbs.

I should stop ignoring it. With everything still attached, bleeding to a minimum, pain subdued, I looked back at the building that filled my vision. The first thing I had seen in this new world. The American white house, or the Capital building, Senate? It was one of them, I recognised the structure at any rate. Even with that crater in the roof.

A glance about the buildings around me was enough to catalyse my assumptions. The place looked like a nuke had hit it and more asides. Giant white obelisk behind me, huge caved in important American building in front of me. I was in the Unified states, or the United states after a nuclear war. It had to be a full-on war that had knocked humanity down a peg or this place would have some sign of occupa-

Rat-tat-tat.

The resounding echoes of gunfire in the distance was the best thing I heard all day strange as that might have sounded. At least that meant that there were people somewhere in this city. I forced myself to my feet on shaky legs and looked down at the equipment that had been spewn about the place. My Mondragon rifle had its barrel bent at an unfortunate angle but the bayonet was still in perfect shape.

Patting myself down I also found that my pistol, a Mouser C96, was still in good condition and the few spare magazines I carried for it were still in place. My clothes had rips and cuts in them but still more or less held together to, if nothing else, protect my modesty. The most sensitive equipment however. My computation orbs were damaged. Well, the type 95, a quad core computation orb and the most powerful ever created, was utterly destroyed.

I almost wept with joy looking down at the melted hunk of metal and crystal. I threw the damn thing in the dirt with a grin as I fished out my type 97 out of a pocket. The condition of that computation orb took the wind out of my sails. The crystal cover was cracked and burned from the inside. Feeding power into it let me feel the clockwork device grow hot in my hand forcing me to reduce the strain. Focusing though it the alpha core ticked along skipping every few heartbeats scattering any spell formula I tried to focus on. The beta core was utterly inert for some reason, jittering now and then into motion.

It was not a great feeling to have a severely limited access to magic in a situation like this. Still I could get a spell out of it, I just had to use the damaged computation device like a single core and simplify any spells I used with it. I would have to rely upon what little magic I could do without a computation orb.

Little was the right word. The orbs were complex devices that allowed a mage to formulate magical spells to affect the world around them. Glancing down at the rest of my equipment I winced at another thing. My flight equipment was ruined.

The large box that helped stabilize flight formula was half melted and utterly ruined. I let out a quiet sigh before unclipping it from my uniform and letting it drop to the floor. I moved to check my flight boot and found, to my relief, it was still functional.

Not that it mattered all that much, with a damaged computation orb and a destroyed stabilizer the boot was not going to do more then throw me into the air uncontrollably. Thinking on it a little more I could still see some use for that so the boot would stay with me. The box however had to go. It weighed more then I did and if it was not carrying itself, it was dead weight.

Having stripped myself of the equipment I could not make immediate use out of I fed my magic into my arms and hands to help me pile the muddy earth over them. Just enough to obscure the equipment that might be useful later.

There it was again. In the distance the familiar crack of gunfire. It was automatic if a slow rate of fire with the occlusal pop from something low calibre, likely a pistol. It seemed to be coming from close to the obelisk, the Washington monument, I think. I considered for a moment the logic of approaching a firefight and decided it would be for the best to avoid it even if that meant avoiding the first sign of human life in this world.

That was an assumption. It could very well be a group of apes fighting aliens over there for all I knew. These universes United States could all speak French too. I honestly had to avoid making assumptions. Now that I thought about it my English was not that great. I had learned some in my high school years in Japan and touched up on that in my second run though university but my command of the language was limited.

"Hello, helloooo. My name is Tanya." I played over the enunciation careful to match the cadence English demanded. I had learned enough languages now that familiarising myself with a new one was old hat. Even if I had no doubt I would trip myself up now and then.

I had to stop stalling.

"Well being X? You said no more reincarnations yet what do you call this?!" I swallowed to sooth my sore throat as I spoke aloud in English. "Does this not count because I have not been reborn? Are you trying to find loopholes in your shitty 'contract' now?" The silence was galling but not unexpected. I would take it to mean that he was seething at me hitting the nail on the head. That made me feel a little bit better.

I needed a direction. I glanced over at the huge building and decided I needed a direction that was not going to collapse on top of me the moment I walked inside. Fuck sake, it was going to be the firefight. I checked my pistol again to make sure everything was in order and then began to stalk out over the mud. There was some sort of pool of water directly in front of me, I thought about testing my boot and flinging myself across. It would not even take a computation orb, I could just feed enough magic into the boot and direct it with a simple formula.

In the end I decided to walk around. The firefight in the distance was a lazy affair, even from this distance I could almost picture it. There was at least one person with an automatic weapon in some good cover. They were peppering another group who were popping out of cover now and then to take pot shots at them.

I just had to get close enough to whatever was happening to scope out the participants. Not that I expected too much. Hopefully it was some looter looking types and someone in a United States uniform. There was no way of the United States had survived the nukes they would do nothing to secure the bombed-out cities. Considering I was not dead from radiation the nukes used had to be some sort of 'clean' bomb or it had been months or even a year since the bomb had hit.

Radiation was a worry but there was not much I could do about it right now. I remembered that the biggest risk was radioactive dust. With how wet everything was I might be lucky, or I might be dead right now and not knowing it. I needed to find a Giger counter somewhere but I did not have the faintest idea of where to begin with that.

After walking across a messy, dug up landscape and trying my best to avoid spraining an ankle. With how much blood I had lost and how I was sure I had at least one broken rib that was a bit of a job in itself. I clambered up a muddy hill to behold a rough network of trenches surrounding a squat structure at the base of the Washington monument. It was in that structure that figures were hunched inside shooting out at a small building that stood as a satellite to the other structures to the north east.

It looked to have one point been mostly glass but that had all been smashed with time and now all that was left was a four-story building left very open to the elements. That was group number two. It looked like there were sandbags arrayed on the upper floors that group two were using to fire down at group one. I had just settled in to watch the firefight when there was a whooshing sound and what could only be a rocket hammered into group twos position.

There was quiet after that, understandably. I shuffled back behind the hill I was laying on as group one seemed to move about a bit as if waiting for a response from group two that never came. The obvious conclusion was that group two was dead or decided that the firefight was not worth it and was currently working out a plan to withdraw.

It was then that a trio from group one marched out of the squat building at the base of the monument in what can only be described as full power armour. Like the armour favoured by Francois mages but bigger. The trio moved in a loping purposeful gait with enough bounce in their step to convince me that I was looking at real power armour.

My little Mouser suddenly felt like the wrong piece of equipment. I wondered what a 9mm round with a piercing spell could do to the armour. But without a stable computation orb that was more risk than it was worth.

Approaching them was a bad idea I had no idea how friendly they would be and I had no insurance if it turned into a fight. There was also the fact that they had just been under fire from someone, that tended to put you in a bad mood.

One of the most important aspect of any meeting was the first impression and I just did not have the tools to make my first impression a good one. That left group two however. I shuffled back over the hill to see if I could move about to get a better look at the building, they had been in to see if I could spot them retreating but there was nothing yet.

Ah wait. I could see them, a back exit facing away from the approaching power armoured trio opened up and a group of decidedly unarmed people filed out. They took a moment to secure themselves with one of them checking everyone over before they began to move away down the way I had come from. At the same time the armoured trio moved into the building they had just abandoned.

Five fighters with what looked like rifles and pistols or a group of people in power armour with rockets?

Wait, what the fuck were group two even doing shooting at them if they had power armour? Could small arms fire damage or punch though weak spots?

I let out a grunt, picking myself up and hurrying after group two while keeping myself hidden. They seemed to be on the lookout for lumbering armoured solders not a child sized shadow poking though the ruins of an American city.

Every discipline, from war to business, required gathering information first and foremost. I was interested in where they were running off too.


"UFO zero, zero six located. Looks to be… Human female in depression, she must have fallen in. Unknown uniform. Damaged technology." Jade glanced back down the hill at the women and the scattered bits of metal and machines around her.

"I can Identify, rifle. Bolt action and some broken… Skis." The man besides her, Nelson intoned into the handheld recorder. The pair of them were sweating themselves to death inside the bright white hazmat suits. Still, it was better then being exposed to radiation and mutagens.

"Any clue what was flying? Some robot or jetpack or something?" The voice came over the radio and Jade found herself shrugging despite the voice not being able to see anything.

"It seems she was somehow. This is where the UFO crashed." After they hit it with a missile.

"Understood, orders are to pick up everything and bring it back to the bunker. Field investigation is out of the question." That suited the pair just fine. Excursions away form Raven Rock were just asking for trouble even with the muscle. It seemed silly as Jade got closer to the prone women but she had seen the data like everyone else. A fast-moving low altitude UFO right over Raven Rock.

When it did not respond to any signal the order was to fire an AA missile at it. The fact that she was still in one piece after getting hit by a missile was odd. She did not even look that burned. Energy shielding and some sort of jetpack? That was Jade's guess. What that kind of technology was doing here when even the Enclave did not have anything like it was the question.

"Holy shit she is still alive!" Jade hurried forward to Nelson as he rolled the women over. Sure, enough she groaned and looked around. The sigh almost made Jade sick. Her body was covered in lacerations, her arms and legs bent at odd angles and she was reasonably sure she could see a rib poking through her torn uniform.

What was worse was the women was trying to sit up.

"Var, var är hon?" With the strangled words from the women who should be very dead. The thundering sound of someone jogging in power armour filled the air a moment before the meathead crested the hill.

"Want me to shoot it?" Came the robotic voice of the power armoured muscle that had joined them.

"No!" Jade shouted back before kneeling down next to the women who was blinking slowly. "No, we are bringing her back."

"Some mutie wastelander?" Came the reply.

"I am getting the feeling we are dealing with something a bit more then that." Nelson mumbled as he watched the women fall back onto the ground eyes closed. He lent forward to wipe the blood away from a gash across her forehead only to find unbroken skin under the wet blood and half formed scab.


Group two had settled down between two large buildings, one being the 'Museum of History'. According to a rusted sign pointing towards the decaying structure anyway. They had lit a barrel alight and where huddled around it as one of them sat on watch looking towards the Washington monument.

They looked more like depictions of homeless people with layers upon layers of clothes then real solders. But the guns were very real. I had contented myself with getting reasonably close with the rough and obstructive terrain allowing me more leeway in how I approach them.

The question of how they would respond to someone simply wandering up to them would simply not answer itself no matter how much I procrastinated. Sometimes you had to take a calculated risk even if it was a big one.

"Hello!" I kept my voice light and high pitched. Hopefully my appearance can be of some use rather then being a hinderance.

"Who is out there?!" Came the reply from someone who sounded like she smoked a dozen packs a day. Wonderful, I hoped the people in this world were more aware of second-hand smoke.

"Over here." I called out holding my hands over my head, if she decided to point her rifle at me, I was more then ready to draw my pistol. "I just want to talk." With how dark it was getting and the fire lighting up behind her it was hard to get a read on her expression. She looked old.

"Wh- Burrows, get over here." I stayed in place watching carefully as one of group two around the fire trotted up to the lookout. From my position I could step back and be almost fully concealed by earth with all of them out of any meaningful cover.

With only a few magazines for my pistol on me I would have to be very careful with my shots to win a firefight. But I was sure I could deal with at least the two closest to me and get the others to run away after that. This was just stupidly risky.

"It's a little girl." Smoker girl said before looking back at me and holding her hands out and squatting down to what she must assume to be my level. "Hey kid, we won't hurt you. Is there anyone with you?" Ah now that was a sensible question. I had not thought of the possibility of a group using a child as bait in an ambush. Things around here must be worse than I thought.

"No, its just me. I don't know where to go." Put a little bit of a voice crack at the end of my sentence to tug at the heartstrings.

"Its okay, you can come over here. What's your name little one?" The man that came over, burrows seemed to smoke just as much as the lookout. I hoped I did not have to be indoors with any of these people.

"Tanya." I said, shuffling forward and letting my hands slowly drop, when they did not so much as flinch at that I let them fall to my sides as I moved towards them.

"That's a pretty name. Come into the light kid, lets get a look at you." I glanced down as I stumbled over some loose concrete and got a few paces away from them before I looked up. My heart froze and I felt a cold sweat on the back of my neck as I finally got a good look at the pair of them.

"Heh, never seen a ghoul before kid?" Burrows said as melted skin and dried tendons moved into what could only be described as a mockery of a smile. They looked horrific, with exposed flesh like a horror movie.

"N-no." My reaction was genuine but I carefully steeled myself. I was not an expert but I knew full well that someone who was more burn than human should not be walking around with a cigarette between his dried lips.

"Hey kid, don't worry, we may look like this but we are still human on the inside, okay?" The lookout gave me another big horrific smile that I struggled to return. "Do you know where you came from? Where your parents are?" The Empire and Japan seemed to be bad responses so I just shook my head, not trusting myself to say anything at the moment.

"We can decide what to do with her later. I am starving." Burrows said turning on his heel and stalking back to the rest of the group sitting around the barrel fire. Now that I got a good look at them, they all looked horrifically burned. The moniker ghoul seemed about right. What kind of weapon could do this to a human? As far as I was aware radiation just killed you. Did it melt your flesh off?

Was this going to happen to me being in a city that had clearly been nuked?

"Come on kid, you hungry?" Not after looking at your face no. The moment I thought that however my stomach began to protest and the lookout chucked. We walked over to the others and I got some tired looks from the lot of them.

"God, kid you look like you have been though hell." Burrows said looking me over. Considering the people I was speaking to had just gotten out of a firefight they had convincingly lost and had melted skin that did not make me feel better.

"Ken, the pure water." One of the so-called ghouls nodded and slipped off his backpack to produce a glass bottle about half full before handing it over to me. I thanked him as Burrows handed me a few strips of dried meat. It was ridiculously salty and I had to tear bits of it off and leave it in my mouth to soften before I could chew it but I had eaten worse.

"Thank you." I said again sitting down close enough to the fire to fight off the chill that had filled the air.

"Kid listen." Burrows began and I looked at him. "You don't have any parents around anymore, do you? Just from the…" He let out a sad sigh. He was correct however. I was technically an orphan.

"No." I said earning some sympathetic looks from the melted people.

"I am so sorry." The lookout clasped my shoulder with her hand.

"Not sure how much help we can be kid, hanging around ghouls is no place for a smoothskin. Let alone a child." Burrows took a drink from a bottle of cloudy amber fluid. Likely some alcohol.

"I don't want to bother you. I can look out for myself." I just needed more information on what was going on and the people involved. Calling me a 'smoothskin' indicated that there were more people who where not horrifically maimed and parallel societies had been created. That made me consider group one. The ones in power armour, were they smoothskins? Had I unknowingly made contact with a group who due to my appearance I was not aligned to?

"You are a brave girl." Burrows said. "There are some settlements that might take you in but they don't tend to like chatting with ghouls." That seemed to prove it. Some kind of racial conflict between people who had been maimed by whatever atomic weapon had hit the city and people who had not.

"Is that the people who were shooting at you?" A polite way of putting it that made this group seem like the people aggressed upon and would put me in their good graces.

"You watched that? They call themselves the Brotherhood of Steel." Burrows began.

"A bunch of punks. Came in a few weeks ago and started fortifying the Washington monument after fixing up some radio dish or something up there. Took some pot shots at the museum so we decided to return the favour in the hope they would fuck off." One of the ghouls, ken, said.

"Ken, language." Burrows glared at the man likely for my benefit. "They don't go out of there way to hunt us down but they hate ghouls just as much as anyone." I gave him a sympathetic look.

"I hope you don't mind me asking, but what happened to you?" I looked around to make sure my question did not upset anyone.

"Its okay. Uh, you know when the bombs dropped?" I did not but I nodded anyway. Anyone who lived here would know about that and he was likely only asking for conformation in order to work out how much he needed to explain to a child. "Well after the bombs dropped the people who were outside of the vaults and not far enough into the rural areas were exposed to a lot of radiation all at once."

"So, the radiation made you look like that?" he gave me a nod before continuing.

"There was not much we could do to avoid it back then, the ones of us who survived the bombs themselves and survived the radiation turned into ghouls." He said with a sigh.

"Sorry." I said quietly earning a smile from Ken.

"Don't worry kid, it's actually kinda nice for someone to ask for our side of things for a change." It also meant that associating with ghouls was not going to do much good if they had been vilified for things outside of there control. The best option might be finding out about these settlements they had mentioned and getting a grasp on what amounted to the government or reconstruction effort.

I had no doubt in my mind that whatever government existed was massively retracted from what it would have been before a nuclear exchange. Honestly, I was lucky there was anyone alive. Trying to survive on my own would have been terrible.

"I will be on lookout Willow, you get some rest. You too kid. We can talk more in the morning." Sleeping around strangers was hardly an attractive prospect even if they seemed friendly enough. I was however, exhausted. I needed rest to deal with my wounds and the strain of fighting just hours ago.

I decided to take the risk, shuffling up to the stone wall behind me I wrapped my arms around myself and bowed my head. Years in the military life had gifted me with the ability to sleep almost anywhere.

My first night in this hell being X had sent me. Honestly. Things could be worse.


AN: Every story begins with a writer staring at a blank word document desperately thinking of a good way to start things off. I think I did an okay job. What do you think?