Took some advice for this one. Hope I executed things well? I know my chapter's aren't exactly the longest, but I'm trying to get things out on paper as I think of it, and I'm probably going to post fairly frequently while this is just getting started.
Well, I've managed a rough list of the quests I plan on considering 'finished' for the story thus far, along with a list of the ones I would like to work through; The latter is, well… A longer list. You can go ahead message me or leave me a review if you'd like to see the list, and I'll send it to you. I will say this, however - if I continue this beyond Take It Back!, it will not follow the quest line of Broken Steel. I do not have that DLC, nor do I have Mothership Zeta or Operation: Anchorage. My knowledge of any of those quest lines is based solely on stories on here, along with me spending entirely too much time on the Fallout wiki in an attempt to gain more knowledge, until I have a chance to purchase the final three bits of DLC from the game. I'd also toyed with the idea of keeping this going and having Charon and Sallie move over to the west coast to meet up with good ol' courier six… Scrapped that one pretty quick, since I've seen it in a couple of other stories that involve Charon.
By the time she finally works up the courage to make her way to Rivet City and ask about her father, Sallie is pretty sure it's been a year since she's since the inside of the vault where she grew up. She doesn't remember the exact date she left, the files that she downloaded that day, like all the rest, aren't marked with the date. All she remembers is that it's been something like four months since she finally when back to the GNR building to ask Three Dog if he knew where her father was, or where he had headed - the information that was the reason she'd dragged that damn dish from the Museum of Technology to the Washington Monument, doing her best to sneak past the trenches that had been carved out, allowing super mutants to hide. If there was one thing she fucking despised about the Capital Wastes, it was all the fucking super mutants. Yao guai and mole rats and those damn dogs, they could be dealt with easily enough - she was a bit of an animal person, admittedly; Not a single animal had attacked her since her first month out here. She was lucky - she'd seen numerous raiders and random unarmed wastelanders torn apart by one animal or another, and she'd be lying if she said it hadn't scared her at first. The longer she was out, the quicker she had learned that the animals only attacked her if she attacked first; There had been several times where they'd even come to her aid in battle when she needed it most.
That had been before Charon.
She watches as the ghoul in question rushes forward, obviously intent on taking out the final super mutant in their path. They're maybe a quarter of a mile from the city at this point, according her pip-boy, but she's pretty sure that if there's anyone outside the city, they'll have no problem hearing Charon as he bellows, "What's the matter? Can't stand the sight of your own blood?" It still surprises her to hear him speak, even war cries and profanities when in combat, considering that she had been his employer for almost a month and half before he seemed to get that she wasn't fucking with him when she told him he could do whatever he wanted. That was a month and a half of him speaking only when spoken to - if he spoke at all. Most often than not, he'd snorted, or rolled his eyes, or simply ignored her to concentrate on weapon maintenance; That was definitely a good thing, because she tended to completely disregard the condition of her weapons. Maintenance wasn't something she did. If something needed repairs before, she'd taken it to Moira, or Lucky Harith if she was lucky enough to happen upon him.
When she sees the mutant fall, she jogs forward to join Charon, double-checking her pocket to make sure Gob's letters were still there. She'd told him she'd take them to Carol - she'd feel more than a little bit guilty if she lost them. As the city finally comes into sight, the pale girl can't help but gape. When she'd asked Moira about the place, she hadn't told her much about it - she'd said it was an old, broken down ship, but she certainly hadn't said anything about the sheer size. Her eyes wide behind her glasses, she slips past Charon and hurries up the ramps to the intercom. She presses her finger to the button, half-expecting to be greeted by nothing but static thanks to the fact that it's very nearly two in the morning.
"What the hell do you want? It's - Nevermind. Extending the bridge."
Sallie doesn't know it, but when she finally goes to confront that junkie fuck Leo Stahl about his chem problem, Charon sees her. He follows her down to the Brass Lantern, and nobody aside from those fucking screwball bomb worshippers seems to notice - if they do, they say nothing because they fear him. He stays outside, leaning against the side of the building, and the lone wanderer doesn't even notice him when she hurries past again, hurrying up two sets of ramps to the water treatment plant. It's safe to assume that, somewhere in that building, is Leo's drug stash, because in all their time staying in Megaton, he's never seen her even look at the plant. When she finally exits again, she's pocketing something and he can't tell what, but she's never struck him as the junkie type. Hell, any chems they'd picked up on the way here from Underworld had been sold practically the moment they'd walked through the corrugated metal gates. He isn't sure he trusts her if she's hiding things like that from him - he didn't need to protect someone while they dealt with their junkie fucking jitters - but it's not really appropriate to ask your employer about their drug habits.
Her returns home, but it's another two hours before Sallie shows up. She's lucky it's still early, so they can get moving. She looks worried, he notes; eyes shifty and slightly damp, hands shaking, the same flush in her cheeks that a child gets when she's caught doing something she shouldn't be. Part of him (a rather small part of him) wants to ask what she did, but it's the very last thing Sallie does before they leave Megaton for the trek to Rivet City, and he figures that she'll tell him eventually, or he'll notice, assuming it's drugs like he suspects it is.
And now, as they stand in front of the chief security officer of Rivet City, the vault girl is pouring on the charm, and Charon is doing nothing more than scowling as the security officer (he sounds vaguely like… A New Yorker, which is something that Charon hasn't heard since before Operation: Anchorage) snaps at the girl, who's trying to explain to him that she's only looking for her father. The security officer, Harkness, doesn't seem to be buying it, but he lets them in anyways, with the promise that if they do anything wrong, he'll shoot them. As they disappear through the door to the midship deck, all he hears is "Keep your dog on a leash!" and he has a half a mind push the asshole the fuck off this boat - but that would be homicide and he's pretty sure someone would notice that Harkness was missing.
Even though it's two in the morning, there are still a surprising amount of people awake. The way they're looking at her, with barely concealed disgust… She doesn't get it, and she sure as shit doesn't fucking like it. Even the people in Megaton don't look at her like this; like she's some child-molesting, baby-murdering, bottom-of-the-godfuckingdamn-barrel scum. It isn't until she ends up at the Weatherly Hotel, attempting to purchase a hotel room from a no-go bucket of bolts that everything clicks into place. The robot looks oddly nervous, eye stalks twitching as it tries to phrase things in the least offensive way possible to avoid losing a comfortable atmosphere and a potential client… And then it has the nerve to ask if maybe she'd like to find a different place to stay with her companion. Fuck, how could she even forget that most people in the wasteland hated ghouls? Jericho only brought it up every fucking time he went into the saloon - he gave poor Gob hell. Shoulda slipped something' in his drink, too. she thinks sourly, her expression contorting into something wholly unpleasant as she eyes the robot. Maybe she should have paid attention all those times Jonas had tried to teach her how to hack Andy.
"Listen here, you useless heap of scrap metal," she starts, advancing. Charon clears his throat behind her and her shoulders sag; Instead of dealing with the robot now, she decides to simply count out twice the caps required for a two-day stay and slides them across the counter. "Just give me the key, scrap heap."
He may be thankful that she treats him as an equal, that she doesn't pull back and wrinkle her nose in disgust when he stands too close, but that doesn't mean he gets it. Even when he was a smoothskin, people hadn't treated him an equal - most ghouls didn't either. God only knows that there had been more than a few ghouls in Underworld who'd thought him not only stupid, but mute. They were wrong - and they were in for a helluva surprise whenever they went back to give Gob's letter to Carol. He wouldn't hurt them, not seriously; He couldn't risk never being able to go into the only safe haven for ghouls left in the wastes.
Charon is silent as they enter the room they've paid for. He drops his pack in the corner, turns just in time to catch Sallie's as she tosses it his way, and sets that on the floor as well. Despite the door being locked, he doesn't remove his armor - these locks were easy enough to pick, and he knows from experience. At this distance, he can tell that, while the wanderer is shaking, it's not drugs or alcohol or withdrawals. She's just nervous, pushing her shaking hands through the tangles of her thick, white hair (when had she taken it down? She never did that, did she?) and staring at the rusty wall. As he approaches the bed, the girl spins, her expression that of someone who was more than just a little distraught.
"I killed Moriarty."
When she'd first taken those syringes from Leo's stash, she hadn't been planning on killing Moriarty - in fact, she'd planned on taking the whole stash and selling it. Instead, the moment she saw the line of med-x and psycho syringes in that drawer, that had been all she'd taken and she was out of there before she realized it. She shook like a leaf the whole walk to the saloon - she didn't have to worry about Moriarty being awake, it was still early and God was the only one there who was ever up this soon. When she slipped in, she saw Gob cast her a shy grin and she squared her shoulders, approaching the bar. "Which food stash's Moriarty's?"
Gob stared at her blankly. "Gob, I know the sorry bastard makes you make him breakfast, can you just… Jesus fuck, is his breakfast ready?" The bartender nodded and motioned to a plate of Brahmin steak sitting on the counter, beside a short glass filled with what looked to be whiskey (his personal, pissless stash, the bastard). "Oh, thank fuck." She rooted through her pockets, placing two syringes each of med-x and psycho on the counter. God, was she ever happy that she'd paid attention when her father had explained what chems to avoid mixing - med-x mixed with psycho was going to mimic a natural death as close as possible. There was no way she'd be caught - she knew Church didn't have the same medical training, and she knew they sure as hell didn't have the equipment in Megaton that was required to test a liquid for drugs. This was foolproof. She emptied the contents of the syringes into the glass and gave it a quick stir, swallowing hard as she disposed of the used needles.
It was a whole hour and forty-five minutes before Moriarty came down for his breakfast, and the vault girl let out a triumphant sigh as the man downed his glass in one go. "I'll be seein' you around, Gob." was the last thing she said before slipping out of the saloon.
Shame, if she'd have stayed in Megaton another ten minutes, she would have been able to witness the death of that rotten Irishman.