Sometimes the plot doesn't need companions. But sometimes the courier does.

Lucky 38

Veronica wouldn't have known that the courier had gotten in at all if not for the fact that she'd heard the water in the bathroom start running. Then the bedroom door opened and she saw Meda's small frame highlighted against the walls—she was going through the wardrobe in the corner. After selecting an outfit, she promptly disappeared again.

Veronica sat up on her cot, yawning, and wondered what time it was. There weren't any windows in the Lucky 38, but the wall clock seemed to think it was about two in the morning. The Pip-Boy Meda had left on the dresser confirmed it.

"When the hell did she leave?" Cass's voice whispered from the top bunk, making Veronica jump.

"I think it was around midnight." Veronica answered, frowning. "You were drunk at the time. I'm just wondering where she went."

"Didn't she take anyone with?" Cass asked, rolling over and slinging her legs off the side of the bed. She groaned—hangovers usually didn't affect her, but apparently two-in-the-morning did.

Veronica shook her head, even though she knew Cass wasn't looking at her. "Not even ED-E. And you know we've never seen her go anywhere without him."

Since the robot had apparently been with Li since before the courier had met Boone, Cass was forced to agree. Actually, it didn't seem possible that the five-foot-nothing woman had actually gone anywhere alone. She always had someone to bounce her personality off of or back her up, even when talking to people like the King.

"Well, I'm going to go see if something's wrong." Veronica said after a moment.

"Great. Tell me all about it when you get back." Cass grunted and flopped back onto her cot.

Veronica sighed and walked out of the room. Hopefully there would be a story behind this, or she was going back to bed and telling Cass the courier was just wandering around the Strip while high on Psycho. Again.

"Hey, Meda? Is everything all right?" Veronica called, walking toward the bathtub that had the curtains drawn. "Meda?"

"I'm here." Meda answered, sounding exhausted. "I'm okay."

"You don't sound okay." Veronica pointed out from outside the shower curtain. She wasn't about to move them without the other woman's permission. Well, unless something drastic happened—like Meda not talking, for example. In that case, she was either drowning or bleeding out, and Veronica didn't intend to let that happen on her watch. She'd be getting an earful from a lot of people, not the least of whom would be Lily and Arcade. And maybe Boone.

"I'm just tired." Meda said softly. "Sorry for waking you up."

"Was your night on the town really that bad?" Veronica asked.

Meda sighed. "If by 'bad,' you mean 'I finally killed the man who shot me in the head and now I have no idea what to do,' then yeah, it was bad."

Yup, this is one for Cass. Veronica thought, looking at the clothes Meda had left on the tile floor. The shirt and bra was completely drenched in blood. "Hold that thought."

"Mm-hm," Meda mumbled, and Veronica walked as fast as she could to Cass's bunk.

And when she got there, she poked the ex-caravan driver hard in the shoulder. Cass jerked awake, swearing under her breath, and leveled a glare at the top of Veronica's head. "What is it?"

"I think you might want to hear this." Veronica said. As Cass climbed off the top bunk, she added, "She says she got that guy who shot her."

Cass's mouth dropped open. "Wait, she really killed him?"

"Seems like it. Or else there was another guy who shot her twice in the head recently." Veronica said as Cass gave a whoop. "But she seems pretty messed up right now."

"What for? She got him!" Cass demanded. "She should be celebrating, not moping her life away in the bathtub."

"Just go talk to her." Veronica told her.

"Fine." Cass shrugged. They stopped next to the drawn shower curtain and Cass said loudly, "Li, Veronica says you killed that fucker who shot you. Don't you feel any better?"

"Not really." Meda said listlessly.

"Why not? He deserved it!" Cass said. If she'd had a chance to go after the Van Graffs, she damn well would have taken it even if they hadn't tried to kill her personally yet. Gloria Van Graff was in serious need of shotgun surgery, in the face. And besides, anyone who tied up some innocent woman on a hillside and tried to blow her head off deserved whatever he had coming.

Meda sighed. "I should probably mention I had to seduce him to get close enough to cut his throat."

Huh. Is that what her problem is? "So what?" Cass said. "That guy—Benny or Butch or whatever the fuck his name was—was the head of the Chairmen. Chances are he's fucked over so many people he wouldn't remember anyway. You did the world a favor by doing him in."

"I know." Meda said. "I just feel weird about it."

"What in the world are you yelling about?" Arcade's voice demanded from the other room.

Boone's voice was some kind of indecipherable growl, shortly followed by, "What's wrong?" as the sniper stalked out into the hallway.

"Okay, you know what?" Meda said, for once putting frustration into her voice, "I am not having this conversation from the bathtub. Everyone out until I get dressed, damn it."

And if either Cass or Veronica had any inclination to stay, it died when the courier threw a bullet case in their direction. After that, it was a question of waiting it out.

Ten minutes later, Meda emerged from the bathroom, wearing a men's nightshirt and a pair of shorts and carrying her soiled clothes under her arm. With a glance at her gathered companions, she sighed and said, "We might as well hold this meeting in the kitchen."

After that, it seemed like the four of them spent an hour prying the entire story out of her.

Almost a month ago, she'd been shot and left for dead in a graveyard north of Goodsprings, which she had never gotten around to mentioning to Arcade, all over some Platinum Chip House wanted so badly. A few days led to her first gaining the Powder Gangers' attention after she rallied the townsfolk to defend a Crimson Caravan merchant from one Joe Cobb. Everyone on the Powder Gangers' side was shot to death before she left, chasing a rumor that the men (several Great Khans, led by a New Vegas man in a checkered suit) who had nearly killed her had gone south, toward Primm.

"That Benny must not have been a real killer." Boone commented in the middle somewhere.

"Why do you say that?" Meda asked, though lacking her usual cheer.

"If he had been, he would have remembered how to double-tap." Boone informed her. "And you wouldn't be here."

"Oh."

From there, she had headed to Primm and its infestation of mercenaries. Even after meeting up with NCR forces there, something had possessed her to head into the town proper and clear them out, even though she mentioned that she'd been convinced the soldiers would get them all eventually. A series of near-death experiences at their hands had convinced her that the rescue mission was a bad idea, she said, but she had to finish what she'd started.

"I tried to get help." Meda said. "So I rescued the sheriff and made him help me take them down, but he died when I threw dynamite. He didn't notice the lit fuse."

"That explains why you went around every NCR camp looking for a new sheriff." Cass remarked. "Guilt?"

"A bit." Meda admitted. "He probably would have made it if I didn't scare him into working with me."

"If you had to scare a sheriff into doing his job, he wasn't a good one." Cass said. "So, how'd you get the rest of them?"

"I had two Stealth Boys and a silenced .22 pistol, so I shot most of them in the back." Meda said quietly.

"You can't even hit a billboard with buckshot!" Cass said disbelievingly.

Meda winced. "Well, yes, but it's kind of hard to miss at point-blank range. A couple of them started running, but others tried shooting back. It's really, really not fun to be shot at when you know there's not going to be anyone to back you up, even with a Stealth Boy."

"How does this lead to what happened tonight?" Veronica asked.

"I'm getting there."

Apparently the experience fighting mercenaries had taught her that she needed backup. So, when she found ED-E sitting in the Mojave Express's main office, she had immediately repaired the damaged eyebot with salvaged parts. After that, she and her new friend had skirted Nipton entirely and instead headed for Novac.

"And that's when we met Boone." Meda concluded. "We visited Nipton and found the Legion, then Boulder City and found the Khans who had helped Benny attack me, though we didn't end up having to kill them. Even if they do hate Boone. And Jessup told me the man I was looking for was Benny. And…after a lot of other stuff that you already know…here we are."

"Did Mr. House ever tell you how the Platinum Chip was supposed to be unique?" Arcade asked after a while.

"It lets him reprogram his Securitrons into an actual army, I think." Meda said with a shrug. "I already helped him upgrade the ones on the Strip, but there are probably more somewhere. And he paid me about a thousand caps. And he lectured me about how democracy destroyed the pre-war world."

"Did he explain that comment?" Arcade's curiosity was piqued.

"No. But I don't believe him." Meda said mildly, pulling her knees up to her chest and somehow making herself look even smaller in an already-large dining chair. "I grew up in the NCR, remember? More specifically, my family's kept ten generations of written records since before the Great War, and there were hundreds of early entries on the buildup to it. It wasn't democracy that broke the United States of America. It was the way their world was dying, when all the personal freedoms were being taken away from the people and everything went so bad that they installed turrets in factories to make the workers keep going." Meda shook her head. "Their whole world was going to end no matter who ended up turning the key."

"Back to the story?" Boone interrupted.

"Ah, right. Well, I finally decided to go visit the Tops tonight." Meda mumbled. "I'd been building up to it for ages, you know. What I was going to do, and say. I even visit the prostitutes at Gomorrah a couple of times to make sure I was getting it right."

Cass, who distinctly remembered being followed out of said casino and shot at by Omerta thugs when Li had decided to help a band of chem-addicted prostitutes escape, said nothing.

"So you seduced and killed him." Boone summarized.

"Ring-a-ding-ding, baby." Meda said, twirling a finger idly. "He didn't even see it coming."

"I imagine he was fatally distracted." Arcade said dryly.

"Well, if that was everything that happened, what's wrong?" Veronica asked. "I mean, there's blood all over your clothes, but you're not hurt, right?"

"Other than the fact that my thighs are on fire, no." Meda frowned. "The problem is that now I don't know what to do."

"I didn't know you had a plan in the first place." Arcade pointed out.

Meda made a shushing motion at him. "I only came to Vegas to kill Benny and maybe find out why he wanted me dead. But now that it's over, what am I supposed to do? House wants to raise a Securitron army to fight the Legion and the NCR at Hoover Dam. The NCR wants to keep the Dam. The Legion doesn't actually have a use for it, since they're all stuck in the Stone Age, but they want to make up for their loss four years ago and they're going to kill so many people..." She buried her face in her hands. "And everyone seems to want me to do something about it. I just want to go home!"

"You're not going to side with the Legion, Meda. And we're not going to let them win." Arcade assured her, all the while wondering if he'd ever be able to tell her about the few Enclave soldiers who could, possibly, be persuaded to help them. Daisy was always so hopeful that she'd be able to fly again… "It's all right."

"I think…I think I know some people who might be able to help." Veronica volunteered hesitantly. There was no guarantee the Brotherhood of Steel would be even slightly willing to help anyone during the upcoming battle, particularly not the NCR. But given what she'd seen so far, it was possible that at least some could be persuaded. Anything was better than no help at all. "If we're going to be helping the NCR fight off the Legion and House's robot army, we need all the help we can get."

"We could help prepare the towns for when the shit starts hitting the fan." Cass suggested, more to make sure Li didn't start crying than anything. "I mean, some of the places we've seen have been pretty defenseless, but there's got to be someone we can help or yell at or something to make sure they don't all get crucified or enslaved or some shit."

"Uniting Freeside and the Strip might help in that endeavor." Arcade added. "I'm sure the Kings aren't interested in sharing their territory with the leather skirt brigade if the Legion does attack."

After a moment of silence, Boone finally added his two caps, "It might help to reinforce the NCR outposts around here. They're struggling, so the Legion's going to probably wipe most of them out if we don't help."

There was a longer pause.

"Meda?" Veronica asked, putting a hand on her shoulder.

Meda gave a hollow sort of laugh, then a sniffle. "God, where would I be without you guys?"

"Dead." Boone said bluntly.

Meda laughed again, straightening and rubbing her eyes. "Okay. Let's continue the war meeting in the morning, when we're all rested and I'm acting less like an idiot."

"What in the world makes you think morning will change that?" Arcade needled gently.

"Shut up, Gannon," she said.

Boone made sure she got to her own bed in one piece—"You can never be too careful when they're like this," he explained later, though no one had asked—and everyone returned to their respective cots. There was always the morning.

And in the morning, well…

"Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war." Arcade thought.