A/N: Procrastinating on things, but still needed to be productive. Funny how that works out.
Bethesda, Obsidian, the remains of Black Isle and Interplay own many things that are related to Fallout, not me.
"Okay, we push on three. Ready?" yelled Sentinel Sarah Lyons to the rest of the Pride. Her power armor felt heavy for the first time in over a decade. She was sluggish, even a little clumsy, as she braced herself against the last unsealed hangar door of Adams Air Force Base.
Adam's Air Force Base was a wreck. Shattered turrets, melted barricades, destroyed vertibirds, dismembered Enclave soldiers, and scrapped robots littered the airfield. The Tesla Cannon was obviously far more an effective weapon than the Codex had given it credit for.
A few hours ago, she'd finally fought her way out of a three week coma. Her father and Rothschild had urged her not to accompany the Pride, her family, for their crap shoot diversion plan. Obviously, she'd gone anyway. Tristan and Gunney practically shoved her into her armor and out the front gate before her dad could issue formal orders for them not to do that. 101 was a Knight of the Brotherhood, and she wasn't about to abandon one of her brothers just because she wasn't 'fully recovered'.
The Oath of Fraternity didn't allow for it.
"Wait! On three, or after three?" asked Paladin Kodiak. If it had been anyone else, Sarah would've assumed they were being a smartass. Not Kodiak, though. He was far too polite. That is, unless he'd become an entirely different person in three weeks.
"On three, Kodiak."
Sarah was not happy. Things might've happened differently if she hadn't gotten her helmet blown off during the assault on the Purifier. She wouldn't have hit her head, and her power armor wouldn't have been effectively useless against the massive burst of radiation. The T-45a was environmentally sealed and lead lined, but without the helmet that crucial protection didn't mean anything. It was a miracle her face wasn't burned off or that she wasn't suffering from stage one ghoulification.
She hoped.
The Jefferson Memorial had done a number on her and 101, but the woman who'd stepped out of the vault woke up first. A week earlier. And she was supposed to be even more dead than Sarah was. 101 was at ground zero when the Purifier overloaded, sacrificing herself for her father's work and tragically planning to die in the very same place. Apparently, something about a 'Moira Brown' and a few dozen benign mutations involving cellular regeneration and supposedly impossible radiation levels had saved her life.
As far as Sarah was concerned, 101 had somehow managed to become a ghoul, without all of the aesthetic side effects. If she turned out to be immortal too, Rothschild's head might explode.
"Shouldn't we wait for Gallows? These doors are heavy, you know," said Knight Captain Colvin. He playfully shouldered Knight Captain Dusk, knocking her off balance.
"Forget about him, he's probably doing something important," countered Dusk. She smacked Colvin on the top of his helmet. "That's what he's doing, right?" she asked Sarah.
"We don't have time for this! That crawler could get blown to hell any minute, so we're focusing on hauling as much Enclave tech out of here as we can! Clear?"
"Yes, ma'am!" they cheered in unison.
"Okay! One, two, three!"
After a few seconds of the combined efforts of five power armored soldiers, the hangar door began to roll open. Sarah pushed with all her might, ignoring her overexertion she was putting on her dulled and weakened body. When it was halfway open, Paladin Glade, somehow, summoned more strength than she thought possible as he laughed heartily. The door slid wide open, revealing something truly astounding.
Dozens of Vertibirds. Unguarded and Intact.
Glade whistled. "Hot damn! It looks like 101 missed a few with that cannon of hers!" He gestured proudly to their newly acquired fleet. "And, if I'm not mistaken, this hangar is well outside of the blast radius of those damn orbital strikes."
"It is," said Paladin Gallows, appearing next to Sarah seemingly out of thin air. He had a sack slung over his shoulder.
"What have I told you about doing that, Gallows? We can't give you support if we don't know where you are," said Paladin Vargas.
"If I need support, you'll know where I am," He pointed to the closest Vertibird. "That one isn't locked."
Sarah stared at Gallows for a moment. "How do you know that?"
Gallows, already halfway to the Vertibird, flashed a shiny piece of metal. "I found the keys."
The rest of the Pride followed him, and Sarah was curious as to what the hell Gallows was planning. He opened the side hatch of the Vertibird and turned to Kodiak. "Strip down to your underarmour. Take the key, sit down in the pilot's seat." He tossed him the key. "Figure it out."
Kodiak looked between the Vertibird and the key. "I...can do that," he said, oddly confident. He started getting out his armor.
"What? You can't be serious," said Colvin.
"For once, we agree," said Dusk.
Kodiak hopped into the Vertibird. "Trust me! I've got a good feeling about this!" he yelled out to them.
Sarah and Vargas walked over to Gallows, neither looking too pleased. "I give you a lot of operational freedom, Gallows, but you have no right to order the Pride around like that," berated Sarah.
Vargas crossed his arms. "What the hell are you even planning? Kodiak can't fly that thing! Nobody outside of the Enclave can. Before the war, it took years to train soldiers to pilot fighters, so what makes you think that Kodiak can just 'figure it out' in a few minutes?"
Gallows looked them over. "He can, because he needs to." He dropped his sack onto the ground and handed them both a paint gun. "101 is a Knight. A brother. We all took the Oath of Fraternity. We don't leave our own behind." He tossed another three paint guns to Colvin, Dusk and Glade. "There's a landing pad on top of the crawler, right next to the tower. We need to be there when she's done." He sprayed a long streak of light grey paint along the frame of the Vertibird and worked his way back, cleansing every trace of Enclave ownership away.
Sarah stood tall. She knew what he was doing. "But only if we're flying the right colors." She set to work on the Vertibird, quickly coating the landing gear with paint.
Vargas, Colvin, Glade and Dusk joined them, and it wasn't long before they'd sprayed every inch of the Vertibird clean. Gallows, true to form, covered the hatch with the Brotherhood of Steel insignia in pale yellow.
It looked beautiful.
This meant a lot more to Sarah than a mere paint job. The Brotherhood of Steel was founded to recover and safeguard Old World technologies, especially military, from the rest of humanity. Those who survived in the wastes would destroy themselves, just as the Old World had done before.
The peaceful, and successful, settlements dotted around the Capital Wasteland were a testament to just how out of touch the other chapters of their order were. These people weren't savages. They wanted food and water, because they already had shelter.
The Enclave used Old World technology for genocide and domination. They were children playing with guns. Feral raiders drugged out of their minds. Slavers, maniac cultists and bloodthirsty mercenaries.
They were the savages, and it wasn't until she found herself repainting a Vertibird that Sarah finally understood that.
Kodiak popped the hatch, grinning wide. "Alright, everyone pile in! We've got a Messiah to save!"
The Pride loaded up into the Vertibird, their Vertibird, and Sarah sealed the hatch shut behind them. "I take it you somehow figured out how to fly this thing, Kodiak?"
"Not even close."
"So how are we supposed to get the hell up there?" barked Dusk.
"It has an autopilot with two dozen presets. I can take us up to the crawler and back to the Citadel by pressing about four buttons." said Kodiak.
Vargas, Sarah, Glade, Dusk and Colvin all stared at Gallows. The Vertibird started move, rolling out of the hangar and onto the airfield.
"You knew," said Sarah.
"I did," he said. He reached up into the storage compartment above his seat and tossed a binder to Vargas. "Found one of those about an hour ago. Had a key in it."
Vargas skimmed through the binder and frowned. "It's a Vertibird operations manual." He passed it to Sarah, who handed it off to Glade. "Why didn't you tell us about this?"
The Vertibird roared to life and began it's take off sequence. It rattled the interior of the hull and Sarah realized, for the briefest of moments, that she'd never actually flown through the air before. She was the first in her family to fly in more than two hundred years.
Gallows shrugged. "We thought 101 blew them all up."
Sarah felt the Vertibird rise in altitude, and tried very hard not to have a panic attack. She was flying. Flying. It was impossible, and yet it wasn't. "None of this matters right now. Kodiak, do we have a visual?"
"Yes ma'am! Her and that big Super Mutant just left the tower. We should be landing in a thirty seconds."
"What? Can he even fit in here?!" said Colvin.
"Can we even take off with that much weight?" asked Dusk.
"Yeah," said Gallows.
"You just have an answer for everything, don't you?" said Dusk.
Gallows shrugged.
"He's not sitting on my lap, I'll tell you that much!" laughed Glade.
"This is one for the Scrolls." said Sarah. She stood up and walked over to the hatch. She looked over the Pride, smiling. "He can sit on mine."
The Vertibird landed and she opened the hatch, fulfilling her oath.
A/N: Bit of a long one here, but I had a lot of thoughts while writing this that I think are worth sharing. It gets ranty, but it's fun.
Obviously, Vertibirds would have an autopilot function in case the Enclave got so small it couldn't afford to train new pilots. It can't attack things or do good maneuvering, but it can go to set places using predefined flight paths.
Sarah Lyons is pretty cool, and I wish we'd seen more of her in Fallout 3. We got LOTS of Sydney, who was awesome...and is strangely similar to Cass, sans all of the vulgarity and drinking... Huh. Anyway, Sarah Lyons. I like that she's not actually a badass, but an excellent leader and soldier. She's by no means Commander Shepard, nor is she the Lone Wanderer, Vault Dweller, etc. It's refreshing, to be frank.
I always wondered about this part of Broken Steel. The Pride shows up, seemingly out of nowhere, with a Vertibird they shouldn't be able to fly that they also found the time to repaint. It was such an awesome moment, but for years I've felt like there was something far more important going on there that we didn't get to see. I played it again recently, and came up with something this basic idea.
The irony here is actually sort of amazing. The hysterical irony of Liberty Prime mistaking the United States Government for the Red Chinese alludes to it a little. "COMMUNISTS DETECTED ON AMERICAN SOIL. LETHAL FORCE ENGAGED." If you think about it, only the Scribes would actually understand how ironic that actually is.
In Fallout 2 and 3, we get a more powerful statement. The sort of thing that the Brotherhood is sworn to prevent is being perpetrated by one of the last remnants (no pun intended) of the Old World. To be totally honest with you, I only figured that out in the process of writing this. I'm not sure if Black Isle intended that or not, but knowing their attention to detail, I have a feeling they did. It only becomes a direct and visible conflict in Fallout 3, and therefore a more obvious antithesis, so that's probably why I saw it now and not after playing Fallout 2 a lot.
A Guest Review asked me to do some M!Courier Cass shorts, because apparently there are few of those. I found that a little surprising, to be honest. She's very much on the hetero side of bisexuality, if that makes any sense. I honestly don't see Cass as being in a straight up lesbian relationship, or even having sex with the same woman more than twice, so I won't be writing that. It wouldn't feel true to her character.
M!Courier is a fun guy, though. In my head, M!Courier is clumsy, while F!Courier is often times absentminded. They both mean well, but have different ways of screwing things up. Obviously, I don't take them seriously in this series, as they're such blank slates you can do pretty much anything.
ANYWAY: Writing the Lone Wanderer, however, is...trickier. She's/He's 19-20 years old for the entire game and naive as all hell for half of it. It's a coming of age story that would require far more nuance. Or maybe I'll just make them far too trusting like ParagonShepard.
That's actually a really funny idea. Hmm.
Next on the docket (maaaaaaaybe...) is Veronica getting closure regarding Christine, ie the truth of all that. Or maybe something with [Companion] and M!LoneWanderer being baffled by the D.C. Metro System. Or maybe something with the Vault Dweller dozing off in the middle of a Cathedral sermon she's/he's supposed to be gaining intel on, witnessed by that Followers of the Apocalypse Spy. We'll see.
Anyway, if you've got thoughts or suggestions/requests/scathing hate, drop it in the box right below this sentence. See you next time!