Another goofy chapter! Just wait, it'll get ugly soon enough.
Also, college has started for me, so updates might be even more random than they are now.
Primm
It was a cold day in hell the day the Mojave Express actually did anything useful other than drag Li to the Mojave. As it happened, the devil was probably organizing a snowball fight on the day that Cass, Raul, Boone and Li stopped by Primm for some reason that probably had to do with ED-E or finally finding a fucking sheriff for the town. The courier had a way of obfuscating her goals that a proper spy would have given his eyeteeth for.
Well, maybe said spy would have had better luck if he was crazy.
And then it turned out that, for whatever reason, Li was stopping by the Mojave Express main office to see if she had any mail. Somehow, it turned out that she did.
"Since when do you get mail?" Cass demanded, trying to read the courier's letter upside-down. "Aren't you supposed to be the one running the delivery part?"
"I don't know," the courier replied, allowing Cass to take the message and looking over the envelope instead. Her face froze up in horror. "Oh, fucking hell."
Cass looked up from the letter, which was mostly made of indecipherable scribbles and weird pictures anyway. How the hell the courier in charge of this letter had managed to find an address was something Cass wasn't going to speculate on. "What?"
"It's from my mother." Li said in a tiny voice. She looked like she was about find a corner to hide in and to curl into a ball. "Fuck, fuck, fuck…"
"How can you even tell?" Cass asked, wondering if she was actually wrong and the letter was the right way up the first time around. Nope, still wasn't legible. Was it supposed to be a bunch of pictograms? "Just looks like a bunch of doodles to me, Li."
"It's in Chinese, Cassidy." Raul said dryly, having seen the letter while she was waving it around. "I'd be pretty surprised if anyone in the Mojave other than the boss-lady can read it at all."
The courier gave a kind of high, terrified laugh that didn't suit her. Evil cackling? Sure. Uproarious laughter? Been there, done that. Then she continued her litany of "Fuck, fuck, fuck…" for a while longer before her voice became inaudible.
"You haven't even read it yet." Boone said, and Cass could hear a note of puzzlement in his voice. She figured he didn't have parents to freak out at him over weird things. She sure didn't.
Cass rubbed her temples for a moment, praying for patience from a god that didn't exist, and said in a flat voice, "I'm not seeing how your mother is worse than deathclaws or cazadores. Or Legionaries or Fiends or the other fifty types of crazy fuckers in the wasteland looking to take a chunk out of us."
Li mumbled something that sounded like complete gibberish. She still looked traumatized.
"Might as well read it, Boss." Raul said. "There's no way it can be worse than what you're imagining."
"You've never met my mother." Li replied harshly. She gestured wildly, arms flailing. "Imagine a tiny old lady—tinier than me—with enough wrinkles to look like a topography map. Imagine she wears her graying hair in a bun you could bounce rocks off, that she likes sitting on the front porch in a huge overcoat with a shotgun across her knees. Imagine that she can backhand you hard enough that you see stars for a week. With her bad arm. Imagine that she's never had to work a day in her life because the only job she's good for is killing raiders and they all ran away in terror of her reputation forty years ago." The courier shuddered. "And imagine that you were the only one of her boneheaded kids to leave home without telling her!"
"…What?" Cass said blankly. Man, when her dad had taken off, he hadn't been able to inspire half as much abject terror, even in the neighbors. And that was after being the Chosen One's favorite traveling companion.
"It's like Boone has a relative." Raul commented, amused. "Well, if he had any crazy old Chinese grandmothers in his family tree somewhere." Of course, he was old enough that he could have been any of their grandfathers' grandfathers' grandfather, but no one brought that up much.
"Don't underestimate old ladies!" the courier hissed.
"Still, it's not like she can backhand you through the mail." Boone said.
"No, it's going to be worse."
Cass and Boone combined their glaring ability. The courier looked trapped for a moment before looking at Raul for some kind of assistance, only for the ghoul to roll his eyes.
"…Fine." Li muttered resentfully. Still, she took the letter from Cass and flicked it open with some trepidation. Then she got to reading it.
"What's it say?" Cass wanted to know, less than twenty seconds after the courier had started perusing it. She was mainly curious because of the expressions Li was making, and because, fuck it, Cass was a bit of a busybody. It was probably Li's fault in the first place anyway.
Li looked up to see all three of her current roster of friends staring at her. Well, Boone might have been hiding it better, but that was only because of his ever-present sunglasses. "What, you want me to translate as I go?"
Cass nodded.
"All right. Not like hearing me get verbally eviscerated is really news, though." Still, she cleared her throat and started on it:
"'Youngest daughter,
"'I wish I could be the angry, wrathful mother I'm sure you've been expecting to appear just behind you for years. It would make you feel like you'd run off for a reason. But while it's only been a year since you last gave me any sign that you were even still alive, I expect you've changed quite a bit from the overeager young doctor I remember walking to Angel's Boneyard. Maybe you're not afraid of your terrible mother anymore, though I doubt it.
"'As I'm sure you know, your oldest sister has two children now with that NCR-enlisted engineer she met in New Reno. Little Cassandra and Cameron are going to be starting at the Followers school in a few months. I seem to remember you saying something about being their schoolteacher when you completed your training and instead you're a few hundred miles away, doing who-knows-what out in the Mojave wasteland without even sending us a postcard to say you're still alive. I don't recall raising my daughters to act like that.'"
The courier stopped and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Fuck, Mom still knows how to make this hurt." Still, she pressed on with her running translation because you just didn't stop halfway through anything in the Mojave. "'As for your other brothers and sisters, they seem to be doing all right so far. Vinny's little boy caught a nasty fever and we were almost convinced he wouldn't make it, but I'm sure the Followers can look after him well enough. Vance's boy and girl are doing well in the local school—smarter grandchildren have never been born, in my opinion.'" Li paused again. "She's sure not pulling any punches."
"Is your mom always this passive-aggressive?" Cass asked.
"Pretty much. Though she could always go straight for the 'aggressive' part if you pissed her off enough." Li frowned, scanning the rest of the page. "It basically continues like that for a while before running onto the back."
"Then skip the parts where she's pretty much screaming at you in pictograms." Cass shrugged at Li's blank expression. "You don't need to keep kicking yourself over not being in the NCR, Li."
Li rolled her eyes. "Right."
The back of the letter, as it happened, had a different tone entirely.
"'It's terrible to be here and still hear my grandchildren demanding to know where their dear aunt has gone. Your sisters and brothers are clamoring for news of what you've been up to since joining the Mojave Express circuit. I don't know what to tell them. Should I say that you've been dead since a year ago and that the Mojave was simply too much for you? Should I say that you've been running amok and wiping out entire nests of deathclaws and taking on Legion troops without trouble? Maybe this letter is going nowhere at all and I should expect it back within a month with a stamp saying that the recipient couldn't be found. Maybe you've been ignoring your family for a year because you've failed at some task and feel you've stained the family honor. Or are you just out of reach, Bai, and I should stop trying to find my youngest daughter?
"'People tell me I should give up. She's not coming back. But I know my daughter a little too well, don't I? You aren't dead. You may not come back to me completely whole—I'm too much of an old soldier to believe that—but you'll send a sign of some kind to say you haven't forgotten where you come from. I'm at least sure of that much.
"'With hope,
"'Li Hui Tao'"
The courier folded the letter up and tucked it into one of her many pockets.
"Your name's Bai?" Cass said in disbelief. Because, wow, she could make about a billion puns with that. It was almost too easy. "And your mom has the same first name as your last name? How the hell does that work?"
Yeah, she was distracting herself from the raw pleading Li's mother had managed to fit into a page and a half of writing, but it she had to.
Li shrugged. "It's an old Chinese custom to put last names first." She took the envelope and began to shred it into little bits. "And as far as I'm concerned, 'Mei Bai'—my first and middle names—is for my mother and siblings to use. Nobody else. Got that?"
"Why'd you change it?" Cass asked. "It's not like anyone would have cared."
"It's like calling Raul 'Raul Alfonso Tejada' every time you wanted to get his attention." The courier crossed her arms. Said ghoul shrugged, since he probably would have just ignored anyone who called him by his full name anyway. Anyone who would have used it normally was already long dead. "Or calling you 'Rose of Sharon Cassidy.' It's just awkward, no matter how short my name is."
"Huh. When you put it like that..." Cass shrugged too. "So, are you going to write back?"
Li frowned again. "I don't know. Maybe after we finish off the Fiends." And then the frown was gone, replaced by a strange energy that made the courier bounce in place. "Speaking of, Raul, didn't I say Cook-Cook's been alive for way too long?"
"That you did, boss." Raul said, "Though I have to wonder what plan you have for chasing down a dumb bastard who's up to his eyeballs in Psycho and chases people around with a flamethrower that doesn't involve any of us being set on fire."
"I'll come up with something." Li insisted.
"See, now I know why Arcade was so freaked out this morning." Cass stage-whispered to Boone.
Boone replied, "Not the worst way to spend an afternoon, though."
"…Fuck it, you're all crazy." Cass grumbled.