Chapter 3
A short while after the events of the previous chapter we noted that there were seven people wounded, and I must now expand upon that statement, as this chapter revolves around quite a different character. Five soldiers, Jack Fife, Milton Ford, Rex Fariss, William Johnson, and Luke Brown received major injuries. 1 soldier had a few glancing blows, but he only got slight injuries. Our last entry is an innocent and she took some pretty heavy hits, her name was Eleanor Clackson. We are not going to get into the effect her injury had on her husband, Andrew, though that would be very interesting, we are going to be talking about it from her perspective.
Eleanor woke up, and almost immediately wanted to go back to sleep, she felt pain all over. She asked the doctor what hat happened, and he pointed the big laser rifle out to her. She understood, but she had not expected how much it would hurt, she knew now why these weapons were so dangerous and decided this was why she would probably not join the ranks. She fell back on the bed, and was asleep almost instantly. She dreamed of better days, back when she worked on the Hellfire Mk 1 power armor and first met Andrew. She woke up a while later feeling much better, she asked the doctor where they were, he told her that they were at the Chicago facility and that they were safe now. She could not figure out how this all happened, but she took his word for it.
What had happened in the meantime was not very interesting, they had sent men in who arranged a vertibird airlift for the wounded, and the rest had come on foot to the Chicago facility. They were still rebuilding and getting set up with the other members of the Enclave there, but by this point any differences had been worked out and they were getting ready to start building up forces. Colonel Autumn had begun to make plans, he had not settled on any so far, but he was thinking. The whole base was busy, it seemed to Eleanor that the only person who had absolutely nothing to do was her so she put her time to good use, trying to think of improvements that would work in power armor.
The next day it was back to work, and there was plenty of it. Eleanor worked on a new power armor frame, she figured that she could make a newer version of the common power armor frame, she could correct some design flaws, like exposed wires and limited protection, she had not had much success though. She also worked on using the other parts of the Garden of Eden Creation Kit from Vault 87 to create radiation resistant prewar crops from those in the kit, she had not had much success yet, though the work on this was going fairly well. She also had to deal with recovery, she had taken some pretty bad hits and would occasionally black out during her work, much to the worry of Andrew.
A few weeks later, Eleanor and her team had success with one of their power armor frames, though it was not much better then the prewar models it meant that they could make a better frame by themselves. About a week later they mad a frame significantly better then the prewar one, it even increased the abilities of it's wearer slightly, enabling them to run faster. The team set out to develop a power armor to go with the new frame, but there were no successes yet. The plant experiment was going well, the team had managed to get a strain of wheat that would be very resistant to radiation, and the mood was fairly high.
Across the Enclave base the mood was getting better, they had repelled several Midwestern Brotherhood invasions and added several technologies to their arsenal. Bad news always comes with the good news, and the fact that they were beating attacks also meant that rumors of the base were spreading across the east coast, and the Enclave were in constant danger of being recognized and attacked by the main part of the Brotherhood of Steel. Eleanor was running into problems with the power armor project, which required her to find a way of minimizing energy consumption as fusion cores would last nowhere near that of current models. Morale was still fairly high through the camp, especially after the leadership decided to give the workers more days off depending on the amount and quality of their work. Shortly after this development the workers finished the upgrades they were making to the facility, which was now even larger and more resistant to radiation that it was when the workers had started.
Eleanor was having more time to work on the power armor, which was her main goal, and the work progressed much faster. They had more success with the second model of armor, which fit with the new frame, but they still had some energy problems that needed to be resolved. A few weeks later they had a success, the power armor was almost ready, all that remained was to test it. While all this was going on Eleanor had fully recovered, Andrew was very pleased and with more days off for the main work force, he was able to see Eleanor more often, and got heavily involved in helping the research team. With Andrew able to run tests on the armor, the research was going much faster, and the power armor was nearing completion. Other things were happening, and Autumn finally revealed his plan for the next step.