I don't know what it is, but this character is so fun to write. Probably because I don't have to stick to "the rules" of conventional storytelling, and get to comment on the meta-game that's happening.

Captain Scruffy received the very bad news that he had to work with one of the Commonwealth factions in order to gain access to the Institute. He hated cooperation of most kinds. This was because only those factions had the resources and scientific and mechanical expertise to pull it off, which Scruffy thought was a load of hogwash. He weighed his options between the Railroad, Brotherhood of Steel, and the Minutemen.

It was easy to check the Railroad off the list, since he had slaughturdered the lot of them just last chapter. There wasn't anyone around to help. Besides, they had proven themselves to be quite fragile.

Cpt. Scruffy was barely even aware of the Brotherhood. They had mostly fallen out of his mind since he saw their airship fly into the Commonwealth like an uninvited guest. He was not a fan of this faction. Back in the Mojave Wasteland, they had opened up relations by putting a bomb collar on him and forcing him to drive off one of their enemies. He had retaliated by shooting their leader in the face and blowing up all of their finest warriors. "No one puts anything on Captain Scruffy's neck," thought Captain Scruffy, "unless it is a pimp-ass medallion for becoming overlord of the Commonwealth." So, he wasn't going to work with them. Unless working with them meant finding their leader and punching him squarely in the jaw.

This left the Minutemen. Scruffy didn't know much about them except that they dressed like cyberpunk Civil War reenactors, and that they were very good at losing. When he happened upon their leader, Preston Garvey Commonwealth Minutemen, he was surrounded and out of allies. They were being destroyed by level 1 raiders in the Museum of Freedom. Scruffy had ditched them in his initial romp to Diamond City. But it was time for them to rejoin forces, hopefully with Captain Scruffy as their new de facto leader. It made sense, after all. They needed a ton of help. Our hero fast-traveled to Sanctuary, where he knew he would find Preston Garvey Commonwealth Minutemen and his sad gang of idiots.

"Hey, good to see you again. I was hoping you'd show up," said Preston Garvey Commonwealth Minutemen. "I should have listened to Mama Murphy all along. Pretty nice place she's found for us. I think we could settle down here, make it a place to call home. What do you think?" Scruffy, not much for small talk, got directly down to business.

"Can you take a look at these schematics? They're for a machine to get me inside the Institute."

Preston Garvey Commonwealth Minutemen stared at him blanky, apparently unoffended by the drastic subject change. What a forgiving guy.

"The Institute? Why in the world would you want to mess with them?" he asked.

Captain Scruffy skipped the rest of the dialogue. It was boring plot exposition, after all.

It seemed that Preston Garvey Commonwealth Minutemen ignored the pressing matter of the missing son, and asked Captain Scruffy to do a couple of random, less significant tasks instead. Typical RPG fare.

The next half hour saw Scruffy running around Sanctuary, haphazardly planting melons, wells, and machine gun turrets until Sturges was happy to call the hellhole home. It took him raiding the nearby Abernathy Farm in order to get all of the materials he needed, but hey, it was a small price to pay for progress. I mean, it's not like he was going to acquire building supplies through less chaotic means. And besides, the residents of Abernathy Farm could have secretly been cannibals, for all he knew. It had happened before! Our hero made sure that their last meal was a full spread of hot lead. And so Captain Scruffy laid the groundwork for Sanctuary Hills, justifying himself all the way.

He checked his questlog. Apparently Preston Garvey Commonwealth Minutemen had given him two tasks, the sneaky bastard. The first one was to build Sanctuary. Check. The second task had to do with a nearby settlement called Tenpines Bluff. Apparently they needed some help. On his way out of Sanctuary, Jun Long approached him.

"Hey, can we talk a momen-"

But Scruffy was already gone, hard jogging to Tenpines.

With no fast travel points between Tenpine Bluffs and Sanctuary, our beloved hero made a beeline across the northern Commonwealth, sprinting, and hard jogging while his stamina bar recharged, and sprinting again.

The settler he encountered at the bluff seemed very scared to see him.

"Who are you? We don't need any more trouble around here," she said, while pointing a double barreled shotgun straight at his chest. "Finally, the respect and fear that I deserve," thought Scruffy.

"Do you always point a gun at everyone you meet?" he asked.

"I'm afraid I do, these days. If we lose any more of our crops, we'll be done for," the settler explained.

"Spare your freakin' sob story." Scruffy advanced through the dialogue, lazily picking the "good" options. The Settler explained, very speedily, that they were being bothered by some Raiders at the Corvega Assembly plant in Lexington. Scruffy, explained, very speedily, that the Minutemen (meaning Scruffy), were going to help her. At the conclusion of the conversation, his quest marker pointed at the plant, which looked to be about a mile away. In terms of Fallout maps, that was quite the distance.

"Really? There have got to be like, seven hostile dungeons between here any there. You're saying that some Raiders came up all this way just to bother you for crops, when they would have had to fight through a bitter hellhole just to get here? Pick a more believable story!" he muttered as he fast-traveled to Diamond City. It was time to sell some loot and then go through a personal transformation process. If he was getting tasked with taking out a Boss-level Raider, then he wanted to make the most of it.

He bought himself a silenced pipe pistol as well as Army Fatigues and an Agility-boosting arm piece. He invested an available perk in the Sneak category. He beamed to Sanctuary Hills and converted his silenced pistol into a hardened, extended-mag sniping carbine.

He left the Captain Scruffy persona behind, and became Commando Scruffles, the renegade ranger who had been tracking a Raider gang through the wilderness, and had now found their based of operation. He was going to stick to the shadows, and destroy all of them without being seen. Or at least, that was the plan. He still had his Minigun for backup.

He stalked through the countryside, subsisting on hunted Mole Rat and some Iguana bits he found in his inventory, bound for Corvega.