Brotherhood of Steel Archive E-2174 Chapter I Initiated...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Subject 2174 (Abel Jenners) Identified. Caution: File Encrypted. Password Required For Entry.
Enter Password Now:
Mistifying
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Password Accepted! Welcome, Scribe.
Abel emerged from the Rockland Car Tunnel exit with cracked lips, a painful hand, and full of adrenaline, but alive. He reached up and turned CAIN's interface and audio systems off, thumbing the straps on his helmet and then unlocking its sealing mechanism, removing it and closing his eyes as the cloud-covered sun irritated his photosensitive eyes. The barren land ahead of him was a bleak, dead brown, the sky an equally lifeless green, a dull backdrop of grey rocks being the only reprieve from the harshness of the new wastes of the once vividly green northern edges of Virginia.
His laser rifle hung loosely in his main hand as he took in the wasteland before him, looking for any sign of the Old World and finding nothing but the heat and the dirt of the nuclear augmented wind. Abel placed his rifle up against the wall and put his hand on the tunnel entrance. Taking a moment to lean against the wall and fumble with his Pip-Boy through fresh tears forming in his eyes, he managed to hit the Stimpak release and sighed in relief as his armor pumped a syringe of the healing substance into his bloodstream, his hand healing from its burn almost instantly and his minorly rattled bones and sore muscles strengthening back into prime shape. With that done, he sighed forlornly and put his helmet back on, pushing off from the tunnel entrance and grabbing up his rifle from against the wall. He checked his map and narrowed his eyes at the unfamiliar markers someone had obviously taken the time to map on whatever networking mainframe was somehow still sending data to and from his Pip-Boy.
His eyes widened as he saw what was once the Pentagon on his map, oddly renamed "The Citadel" in his system. Someone considered the Pentagon an installment worthy of being referred to as a fortress, which meant that someone had to be using it as a military installation. If there were to be any remnants of the United States military in this barren wasteland, it would be at the Pentagon, one of the most heavily defended buildings in the capital.
His destination set, Abel took a deep breath and steeled himself, cracking his neck and hoisting his rifle up to rest on one shoulder. Then, he started walking.
He passed a large tower named "Tenpenny Tower" on his map from the south. Although it seemed mostly empty from the outside, he could see an old man on the balcony who, fate be damned for it, had taken a potshot at him when he noticed the power armored man walking through the wasteland. The resulting sprint had led him past a shelled out gas station and a while of walking later had left him marching northward both in course correction from his sprint and because of the marker labeled "Fort Independence" on his map. Silently swearing to return to Tenpenny Tower and display his displeasure at being fired upon by the old man at a later date, Abel set course for the fort, determining that he would then head straight east from the fort until something blocked his progress once more.
The walk was uneventful and he found himself holstering his rifle. He could hear nothing but the occasional gust of whistling wind, and inside of his defensive shell he felt nothing of the hot wind of the wastes. In front of him laid nothing of the former life of the area, the overhead girders and roads having since long collapsed and apparently the wildlife (if any even existed in this area) having found someplace else to roost. He had spotted a lonesome Protectron roaming at its own sedate pace along the road to the west of his path towards the northeast, but decided to avoid contact, his only experience with technologically knowledgeable humans in this New World having resulted in a sharp burn on his hand and several deaths.
It was past midday when he arrived at a junction between an overhanging bridge with an automated turret and a cracked road. Beneath the bridge rested two sandbag fortifications, and the changing of fate. As he approached, Abel made out the silhouette of a power armored figure holding a laser rifle. Its T45-d was just like his own, but was covered in black and red markings made with paint and its laser rifle had obviously seen better days. At first Abel was surprised at the equipment that he was able to make out as he got closer, but judging by his interactions with humans before this upcoming encounter, he figured that power armor and laser weaponry were simply far more common than he had previously thought.
"Keep your head down, idiot! Raider incoming!" he heard the female voice of the figure shout to him from behind the barricade of sandbags. Abel turned his head in an instant to the road behind him as three men with makeshift weapons made out of pool cues and tire irons charged from over the hill. The "battle" which followed was short and bloody. The power armored woman only fired a single shot and the automated turret let off two pitiful bursts. Abel watched, dumbfounded at the stupidity of the "raiders" as they charged right into their deaths and made it not fifty feet from their hill before all three were dead, and then turned back towards the defensive position and continued walking, one hand on the stock of his laser rifle on his back.
"Halt, local! Keep your hands where I can see them and away from that rifle on your back! You're going to get yourself killed out here with reactions like that," the woman in the power armor said, turning her rifle from the three dead raiders and training it on his head. Abel, for credit either to his bravery or his charm, kept walking forward until he was a few feet in front of the sandbags, figuring that as she had warned him about the (admittedly pitiful) raiders and hadn't shot him yet, she wasn't planning on doing so now.
"Yeah, I'd hate if my corpse ruined this lovely Wasteland. It'd clash with the drapes," Abel responded. His tone was dry and a bit cutting, despite the humor behind it. It worked, though. The woman lowered her rifle to be pointed at the ground instead of at his face.
"Yeah, the red would never go with all of this brown, but if we remodel later and we still need a corpse, we'll call you, 'kay? I'm Defender Anne Marie Morgan with the Outcasts. Good to have someone out here who can keep up," she replied and finally stood down, her rifle pointed at her feet at last.
"Colonel Abel Jenners, United States Army. Outcasts?" Abel asked.
"We call ourselves the Outcasts because we split off from the Brotherhood of Steel. We collect technology to preserve it from tribals and idiot locals. Way we figure it, if traitors think we're too harsh in following orders, we're probably doing something right. You said the United States Army? Like the Old World military? What, you some kind of crazy?" Morgan replied.
"Long story. I'm older than I look. What's your beef with this 'Brotherhood of Steel'?" he continued.
"You mean aside from the fact that they ditched their mission and went native? Sure, I bet you don't mind them being cuddly with the locals, but when we came out here we had a mission to do, dammit! But... now they're wasting their time protecting yahoos like you, while Ahab Lyons is chasing off his Super Mutant white whale," she responded bitterly, her tone getting more hostile as she continued.
Abel's eyes narrowed behind his helmet's metal facemask, one eyebrow raising in a bit of annoyance but mostly minor surprise.
"I've never met this Brotherhood of Steel, nor have I ever heard of these Super Mutants, but judging by that analogy you think that these Super Mutants will end up killing this Lyons guy," Abel concluded succinctly, eliciting a shocked reaction from the woman in front of him.
"Wha...? Well huh. And here I thought I owned the only copy of that... Anyway, I don't know if the old man's going to die from them, but he sure as hell looks like he's going to drag his soldiers down with him. But he's not wasting any of our time anymore, dammit. You said you'd never heard of the Brotherhood of Steel or Super Mutants before, local? What rock have you been hiding under lately?" she asked.
"Ahem... A large portion of an Appalachian mountain. I've been out of the loop for a few years. Decades, I mean. I'm actually not a local. In fact I don't think I've got any culture that you'll be familiar with in the wasteland," Abel replied, crossing his metal coated arms over his chest.
"Yeah? You don't sound like you're that old, bub. How many years has it been?" Morgan asked. Abel toyed around on his Pip-Boy for a few moments before he got the medical records up from his slumber in the bunker. He twisted his arm and put his screen in front of the armored woman's faceplate.
"But it says here that you went unconscious in 2077 and healed for the next 200 years. That can't be right. You don't sound like a ghoul under that shiny new metal at all," Morgan said in disbelief.
"Like I said, Colonel Abel Jenners, United States Army. What's a ghoul?"