And now, Eleanor and her task force land on the capital wasteland and make camp, this should be interesting...
Eleanor sighed as she played with her telekinesis in boredom. She and Delta were in a bathysphere heading towards what used to be Washington DC, several others followed behind them.
The feeling of slowing down made her look towards the pilot, who nodded towards her.
"Miss Lamb, we are there. Strange as it is, the water seems to be pure." Eleanor nodded and pulled on her helmet. As she stood up she showed that she was wearing the full armor of a Big Sister.
She looked to the window as the bathysphere rose out of the water, the first glimpse of sunlight since returning to Rapture blinded her a bit, but she kept staring as the submersible turned around, showing a very depressing sight.
The land just outside showed a destroyed city, with no vegetation at all along the shore. Eleanor shook her head and waited for the bathysphere to get as close as possible, then she opened the door, stepping out into knee high water, with Delta stepping out soon after.
The other subs landed and the marines helped the scientists ashore. Then they and Delta started dragging the bathyspheres directly on land, Eleanor helping with her telekinesis.
Camp was set up, and Eleanor lead a small scouting team out along the coast to check for any activity, then they would head inland with caution.
Stepping over the rocky terrain was a bit hard on Eleanor and her marines at first, she quickly got used to it. Eventually one of her marines called out.
"Ma'am! I see something!" She looked over where he was pointing, it appeared to be a grounded aircraft carrier, but very rusted. But what surprised them the most, as it was night-time, they could see lights coming from the exposed ribbing and windows, almost like a city.
"Ok men, it seems to be occupied. That's good, it means humans aren't dead yet. I'll go on ahead while you stay hidden, I can be much stealthier than any of you can." They nodded.
Eleanor made her way to the carrier, noting another source of light coming from what she knew, in her collected knowledge, to be the Jefferson memorial. It had been overhauled with gigantic pipes that seemed to be pumping out tons of water.
Ignoring that, she snuck around, using the debris as cover, spotting a bored looking woman manning a desk in the remains of some kind of visitors center, talking to several people and handing them bottles of water, while other people loaded crates of, presumably, water onto large wagons made from what used to be truck trailers.
After watching this for a time Eleanor spotted a sight that at first horrified her. She saw what looked to be a heavily diseased cow with two heads. Both lazily swung around as it was loaded with water. They both worked in conjunction to provide a 360 degree vision to the animal, so she guessed it wasn't all bad. And as she looked closer, she could see that when it bent down one of its heads to chew on a bit of its food, the other would look more alert and gaze back and forth, observing for threats.
Eleanor then backed away and made her way to the memorial, spotting heavily armed men, or women, hard to tell, in heavy looking suits of advanced looking armor either in lookout positions or conversing with others, a few without helmets on were closer to the memorial, talking to a couple of people in lab coats.
After observing for several minutes she made her way back to her team, then back to base camp.
Walking over to the scientist who had made themselves comfortable in unnecessarily waterproof tents, she took off her helmet.
"I think we may need to capture someone, there is too many unknowns right now." A tall and lanky man, who was smoking a cigarette to her distaste, frowned at her.
"I don't think that is a very good idea, what if they very organized despite their appearance and try to locate the missing person?" This made Eleanor pause. They had no idea of the advancements that the world could have stumbled upon in their 309 year absence. If the survivors had discovered a different way of producing plasmids or simply superior weapons.
Thinking carefully, Eleanor spoke her mind.
"We should grab some of the most disreputable looking ones. Then simply ask them some questions in a darkened room so they can't see our faces. Only basic questions like general history and common knowledge, if they aren't willing we'll grab another one until we have some basic background knowledge, I won't even consider speaking with any leading forces without some intelligence." He nodded, then they prepared a tent for interrogation while three marines set out among the ruins to bring back some captives.
After about a week or so Eleanor had learned much from people. They called the region the capital wasteland and there as several "Bastions" of civilization left.
The names of these places were Rivet City (The lit up ship), Megaton (A city formed around... an unactivated nuclear bomb), City 101, Canterbury Commons and several other smaller ones.
She had learned that there had been several species formed, the most interesting were the Super Mutants and the Ghouls. She'd have to study them more later.
The most interesting thing was the technology, oh the technology! The scientist in her was basically drooling with glee to get her hands on these so-called "Energy weapons" and power armor. Even the nuclear catapults called "Fat-Mans" (presumably named after the first hydrogen bomb that dropped on Hiroshima).
Rapture of course already had a unique form of energy weapon, the experimental ion laser was such a one. She'd have to compare later on.
Interestingly, there was barely any genetic enhancements beyond the obvious supermutant ones that she had manages to figure out existed. At least they had an edge out here.
Then she thought of this "Lone Wanderer" Who had basically became famous overnight for outrageous deeds and had established City 101. The city had been growing fast and had become a bastion of science as many hopeful scientists started settling there. She'd have to pay the place a visit sometime.
Though right now, in her temporary lab, she was systematically studying the substances called "Rad-away" and "Rad-x", hoping to successfully reverse engineer them and also use them to make a permanent radiation resistance gene tonic for anyone heading to the surface, and a lot of other things that really needed such a thing.
Sighing, she decided the materials she had at the camp were not enough to properly study the substances, and had a large amount stored and readied to be transported back to Rapture, along with several stimpaks and med-x, and other samples of technology.
Now she decided on what to do about these cities, of course they would have to make contact soon enough, but she decided to wait until they absolutely had to and kept sending teams into the ruins to find new tech.
Xana was sleeping in her Overseer's chambers when she was woken up by her companion Sergeant RL-3 who had been guarding the outside door. He had roughly pulled her blanket off showing her in her normal vault jumpsuit that she wore as pajamas.
"Get up, there's some meatbags from other cities wanting to talk to you." Xana groaned and covered her eyes wither her arm.
"What time is it?"
"Around five thirty." Before Xana could let out a growl of anger RL-3 interrupted.
"In the afternoon." Eyes wide Xana jumped out of bed, then quickly stripped and put on her heavily modified vault security uniform.
She had basically replaced the entirety of the ballistic vest's in sides with the material from a suit of advanced combat armor she had managed to scavenge, the paddings on the blue parts reinforced and, taking inspiration from Toshiro's armor, had made samurai style pauldrons and hip guards from the same segmented black polymer armor. Her boots were thicker and black, reaching her knees, while the gloves were also thicker and black, but reaching up to her elbows. The 101 symbol on the back had been refurbished, with added 101 on both her pauldrons. Then she prepared her weapons.
Her favorite laser rifle, Metal Blaster, was slung on her back, her 10mm pistol went on her hip. And on her other hip went her Chinese shocksword, renamed because she had forgotten the old general's name who it used to belong to.
It wasn't her full load out, but it was the one she always had when outside her quarters. Gesturing for her robot friend to follow her she made her way through the ever so familiar tunnels that form the foundations of the new city above.
With the resources from the Pitt her city more resembled a newer version of the old world architecture. But obviously with shorter buildings. Metal scavenged from both the Pitt and the capitol's older buildings were melted down and formed into new rebar, new reinforcing casings for the buildings and new tools to make them.
After having created a sort of recycled concrete from smashing apart old building and using old world manuals to create the mixture, the city probably had the only truly new buildings on the continent. With the massive amount of trade between The Pitt and City 101 caravans had been forced to upgrade their carts using old trailers and two Brahmin per trailer to pull the massive loads.
Having helped the Treeminders in Oasis make Harold's tree, Bob, produce more spores the plants were starting to show beyond the small rocky crags and Xana had been forced to send a small detachment of the Brotherhood to guard the peaceful settlement. Plans were made for proper farming and Brahmin ranches but the fertility had not spread enough to do so, she had been sending mercenaries into various abandoned vaults to try to find more GECKs though, exploring herself occasionally.
In fact, maybe she should get that Van Braun out of his little personal vault hell to try to extract the information on how to build them from him. They would help immensely with the growing population of City 101.
But back to the matter on hand, Xana stepped out past the open vault door, the short cave outside had been shaped into a proper hallway and some new doors went into the sides. Stepping into the sunlight she squinted at the delegation from Megaton, Rivet City, Canterbury Commons, and even the Republic of Dave, surprisingly. The teenage girl looked so out of place among Moriarty, Uncle Joe, and Bannon.
Xana smiled to the three she knew and spread her arms, while Toshiro caught up to her after hearing she had awoken, standing stoicly behind her in his new armor. It was basically normal samurai armor but made from melted down Hellfire armor from dead Enclave. It was painted black with the yellow 101 symbol on his back and pauldrons like Xana. But he had a yellow Vault-tec symbol on his chest.
"Welcome to my city, why are you here though?"
"Trade." Was most of their answers.
The teenager then spoke up.
"Alliance formation." Xana just rose an eyebrow and laughed.
"Sorry girl, go back to your father. You have nothing I want." She was about to lead the others to her underground office when the teenager called out to her.
"We have mini nukes! Dozens of them and more coming soon. We've already got a stockpile ready for trade." Xana looked back at the girl in shock, said girl then smirked.
"Are you ready to talk now?"
Later on City 101 and the Republic of Dave officially entered an alliance, much to Xana's ire. 101 would provide the Republic with soldiers and medical supplies while the Republic sent many mini nukes.
Xana had been shocked to learn that the republic had stated letting other people in it, it now looked like a proper settlement, on it's way to being a full city soon enough.
The person who was providing the mini nukes shocked her too. It was a young girl genius, one of Dave's kids, who had figured out how to make somewhat weaker versions of mini nukes with fission batteries, microfusion cells, and various other ingredients that were not told to the public.
She had sent orders to the Pitt to make some fat-mans which would be provided to the sentries on the almost finished concrete walls. The walls were also made of fresh concrete, showing the city to show to the world it was progressing away from scavenging (Even though they recycled materials from the ruins, but Xana preferred that to be called waste-mining).
All the scientists at the camp were packing up, ready to back to Rapture and start studying their new samples in full. Meanwhile Eleanor and her marines would stay and scout out the rest of the region, she'd go undercover into the various cities to learn more of this post war world.
She watched all of the bathyspheres leave laden with many samples, and headed into the ruins with her marines.
Sorry, no codex this time, im feeling a bit lazy, especially after losing almost half of the chapter when it was done because I forgot to SAVE MY FREAKING PROGRESS!
Ehem, sorry, I'm really hating myself for that. So, review and I'll be back... soon hopefully...
Ah yes, sorry but updates are going to be slowing down soon, I'm running out of rough drafts to fix up, I'll try to write new ones as fast as I can though, but I also have to watch some mass effect walkthroughs to touch up on it too, and that'll take a while because fucking YouTube is being a bitch, videos keep on being interrupted, not by ads but they just stop buffering for no reason and no matter how many times I refresh the page it doesn't fix itself. PLEASE HELP ME!