Deciding to lose no time, you do as your instinct tells you and concentrate on being a giant fucking pain in the ass for reality.
Hey, you didn't choose how this works.
After a short while, you suddenly hear a reverberating plop and suddenly you're elsewhere.
... This kind of reminds you of when you woke up in your coffin, actually, just that it didn't have a nice window to the outside.
Engaging your claws, you start to claw at the container constraining you... only to find you didn't really do much.
Apparently, your claws aren't sharp enough to cut into this material. No matter. You keep at it, smashing your hardened fingers into your surroundings, eventually making a decent dent into the area below the window...
Only to be interrupted when a figure becomes visible. You peer out and see...
... what looks like a woman, judging by the few details you can make out through this foggied glass. She comes closer and seems to fiddle with something to the side of your little prison.
In short order, the front of what looks like it was apparently a pod of some kind lifts up, releasing you into the arms of a crying woman. Great, this is why you liked Kate so much; she expressed her emotions by shooting people if she felt the need to.
"You're alive, someone's alive, I'm not alone," she murmurs on repeat, hugging you closely. Well, there goes your quiet solitude as a pod person, you suppose as you hug her back, trying to reassure her so she lets go already.
Rolling your eyes behind her back, you murmur back "Yes, I'm here, I'm alive, everything's going to be okay..." and variations thereof until she finally calms down a few minutes later. Releasing her, you get up and take a look around.
This place looks like some bad sci-fi movie set, the kind that nearly completely died out after capes really started conquering popular culture for themselves. To the sides, more pods like the kind you emerged from. Unmoving forms fill them; judging by the circumstances, they're likely all dead and... frozen? You just realized you're pretty cold, and the woman still clinging to you isn't that much warmer.
Some kinda cryopods? Cool shit. Looks like you're in some kinda world with advanced science, so double cool. Depending on what you can get in terms of blueprints and everything, this might be even better than you'd first assumed.
"...Why are you naked?", comes a faltering voice, pulling your attention back to what you were doing. Right, you're naked, with a woman having a nervous breakdown in your face. How to deal with this?
"I was naked when I arrived," you tell her, waiting for the inevitabe "Arrived? In the Vault, you mean?"
"No, when I arrived in this dimension. I hop dimensions sometimes, and just now I was apparently deposited in one of these pods."
"Great, first living person I find and they're insane. This is off to a great start," she says, mumbling that last part.
In response, you just smirk, raise your hand and exclaim: "Freeze water and shoot it at my enemy!", followed by your water shard flying through the air and impacting the far wall. With eyes wide as saucers, she turns back to you, making you grin smugly as you say "Yes, I can do magic, too."
She just stares at you for a long minute, you grinning back at her. Eventually, she seems to gather herself, shaking her head a little and saying: "Well okay, Mr. Dimension Traveler, my name is...
"...Nora. Just, Nora."
"Gabriel, but feel free to call me Gabe. So, where are we, exactly? I don't particularly recognize the surroundings, but that's rather to be expected."
"... We're in Vault 111. This was supposed to be a safe place to live in case nuclear war broke out, but when it did and we got down here, they put us in these... pods."
Well now, looks like you've hit upon a whole mine of issues just waiting to be poked. At least she isn't crying anymore. You guess that waking up and finding everyone you went into cryostasis with dead, knowing it was just a matter of chance you were the lone survivor would shake people up pretty badly.
Still annoying, though.
"I actually woke up earlier, I saw how they... how they shot my man and took my baby. I'm going to find them."
Aaaaand there is why she reminds you of Kate a little. Murder in her eyes and if she had a gun, she'd be toting it. Well, how do you respond to that?
Looking her deep in the eyes, you say in your best husky voice: "Murder is my language, miss, and you just spoke to me."
... Why is she blushing? And backing away from you. No matter.
"Though, something I'd like to note, I can't travel during the day. I have a rather bad sun allergy, you see."
"What, you're a vampire now, too?" she asks, looking at your face defiantly for whatever reason. "The fuck are vampires?" you counter, not missing a step and looking right back.
"You know, bursts into flame in the sun, drinks blood, supernatural powers?"
...
MOTHERFUCKER
You know what, fuck this. You can deal with this whole... thisness later.
"Sure, why not. I'm a vampire. I do drink blood by the way, so let's hope there's some assholes to eat once we get out of here," you grin at her, showing just a hint of teeth this time.
She pales and takes a step back, though she quickly recovers, stumbling over her words "What? But, that was supposed to... what?"
You just smile as you start to explore the surroundings. This is a dead end, so only one way to go. Nora quickly follows.
Exploring a bit, the two of you come upon a police baton and a gun, a 10mm if Nora is to be believed, a pretty popular and reliable one widely used, before those bombs fell, anyway. Apparently Nora is somewhat of a gun nut, or at least she knows the usual models and can tell you a bit about them.
Or at least talk your ear off while you pretend to consciously listen as you search around for anything useful.
Finding a few rations you gladly give Nora, just as you do with the weapons ("No, really, I really don't need to eat normal food"), the two of you enter the next room and are confronted with... well, Nora just screams, but you keep your cool when the giant cockroaches approach the two of you.
Immediately springing into action, you measure your target and cast: Freeze water and shoot it at my enemy!
Hitting the nearest of the charging insects of unusual size and utterly spearing it with the ice shard, you look at the other 11 roaches coming at you.
Nora rallies herself and shoots, but misses the things. You notice her arm seems to be shaking, and not from fear or anything. Looks like the cryosleep did a number on her after all, not that it can be helped right now.
Regardless, the first group of roaches has arrived. Time to get your stomping game on, you suppose.
Opening your claws, you are prepared when the first group of roaches comes at you, meeting the charging jump of the lead roach with a clawed swipe and utterly annihilating it. Literally, the thing comes apart and flies in several directions.
In other news, you now have roach juice all over your hand, Ugh.
Not to be discouraged, you keep on hitting the giant cockroaches as they come at you, clawing and stomping them as appropriate, killing the first four of them to reach you with relative ease even as Nora takes aim and lets a few bullets fly.
Unfortunately, she seems utterly incapable of hitting anything. In the meantime, three of the seven roaches are attacking you, even as the last four of them are trying to surround you.
They come at you in a flurry of self-launching tackles, trying to get at your vulnerable parts, but no matter how big a target you are, you manage to use your superior physical capabilities to evade all of them.
You get ready to take care of the rest.
In a single motion, you start to utterly dismantle the roaches. Hacking the first two apart with your claws (they aren't that sharp, but enough brute force lets them cut just fine), you kick the last one into the next group, actually killing both of them. You're on a roll, today.
Only three of the things left.
Nora, meanwhile, seems to be getting her shit together, shooting the last group and actually killing all three of them, hitting two of them with one bullet, even.
Happy this whole episode is over with, you approach Nora, who is currently reloading her gun and eyeing your claws suspiciously.
"So... you have claws. And we just fought off a dozen giant cockroaches," she states as much as she asks.
"So I have and so we did. I didn't realize you were still feeling crappy from cryosleep, though. If I did, I'd have suggested we take a bit to rest until your aim stopped sucking."
Scoffing, though now with a small smile on her lips, Nora shakes her head and starts taking a look around.
In short order, the two of you unearth several boxes of ammunition Nora stows away inside her belt pouches, another gun you tell her you won't need, a few small syringes she calls 'stimpacks', apparently some kind of combat drug to let soldiers ignore and heal damage to keep on fighting as well as a few bits and pieces of what looks like it used to be luggage stowed away in a corner.
Looks like some of the ice chunks in the malfunctioning cryochambers actually took the time to take their worldy possessions along to what turned out to be their grave. Their loss, your win.
It's a bunch of VERY weird choices, too. No clothing that you can see, or really useful stuff in general. A toaster, a toolbox you actually make a point of taking along, several boxes of several kinds of ammunition, though no guns that you can see, small household appliances, etc. Nora just shakes her head at what you find.
"We just barely made it onto the elevator platform and down the shaft as the bombs detonated, we actually saw the mushroom cloud in the distance as we went down, and yet people still felt the need to take along this random crap. Puts a lot of things into perspective."
Well, you're not gonna dispute that. Separately stowing the toolbox and the ammo on Nora, the two of you are about to go on your way when the two of you realize you completely ignored the pile of folded jumpsuits in the corner, the same kind that Nora's wearing.
"They were made to fit all sizes, so how about you get dressed already?"
Shrugging, you do as you're told, seeing no reason to keep Big Gabe swinging in the wind, and put one of them on.
"Are you sure they fit all? With this bulge, I look like some kinda pornstar over here."
Looking at her, Nora hurriedly raises her gaze to your face, now sporting a wonderful blush.
"Just, just keep on going for now." she says, making you shrug again and open the door to the next room.
What you see on the other side of the door is some kind of generator room, you're fairly sure. Of course, the heavy machinery is malfunctioning, judging by the bolts of electricity currently impacting the corpse of another giant cockroach.
Not too keen on getting struck with lightning, you let your eyes wander along the outer walkway leading around the edge of the room, spying another five roaches.
Well, at least they're divided by a larger distance. You suppose you could pick them off one at a time with relative ease, though the disgruntlement at fighting things you can't eat is still strong in you.
Taking the opportunity for what it is, you immediately start to cast your ice shard spells at the oversized insects, piercing through them one by one as they approach. Nora helps by shooting the ones further away, and one of them even tries to cut through the hazardous area, only to get struck by the electrical discharges and die.
Overall, this was a rather easy mop up. No real danger or anything; with that done, the two of you move on and find yourself in some kind of office room, from what you can tell. Seating herself on the chair and starting to type away on some kind of blocky computer, Nora soon frowns and goes through several interesting face configurations from there, immensely amusing you even as you gather up a few more stimpacks and half-filled ammunition boxes.
"Okay, so apparently, the 'overseer' of this place had an actual thing for cryotechnology. He even tried to create some kind of portable cryoweapon we may as well take a look around for later. On a more important note, though, is that Vault-Tec was supposed to send a 'clear signal' once it was safe to go outside again, but they never did. This guy was also supposed to open the door after 180 days, but without the clear signal, he never did. From what I can gather from his personal notes, everyone here most likely starved to death."
"Not pleasant, but then again, apparently these guys, and Vault-Tec in general, were involved in some serious human experimentation, so I wouldn't feel bad about it if I were you. By the way, do you think that thing over there is that cryoweapon he wrote about?" you ask, pointing at the clear case, though frozen over from within, you'd spied while searching the place.
"Looks like it," Nora says, walking over and inspecting the whole thing, "but I'm pretty sure neither of us is getting through this lock any time soon. Let's keep this thing in mind for later and move on for now."
The next half hour or so is spent much like you just did, killing giant insects and making your way through abandoned vault areas. Soon, though, you find yourself in a fairly open room, with a whole bunch of skeletons inside it, one of them wearing a lab coat of some kind with a curious contraption strapped to an arm.
"A pip-boy," Nora mutters, before wandering over and taking it from the corpse before strapping it onto her arm.
Her makeup still smudged from crying earlier (and messed up by who-knows-how-long of cryosleep), she still cuts a nice figure, you gotta say. Not the time to get distracted, though.
"Okay, I think I'm getting this thing working. Now... this-" she says as she plucks an adpater of some kind off of the 'pip-boy', "should fit right here..."
After a bit of fiddling, she starts the process of opening the door, formed like a giant cog, making you feel like this is at least a B-lister sci-fi movie, up from your earlier evaluation. It doesn't take long until the way is free, letting the two of you move on into a complicated elevator setup.
"So, judging by what you said, this elevator is an open platform?" you ask, not feeling too keen on a close encounter with sunlight.
"Yeah. Want me to go up first, see if it's day outside or not?" Nora asks, clearly following your own track of thought thanks to your earlier conversation.
"Please do."
It doesn't take long for Nora to make the trip and back, bringing the bad news with her; apparently it's around midday. Oh, also, the neighborhood she lived in is in ruins now. She had a lovely view from the platform, from what she told you.
That still leaves you effectively trapped in here with a whole bunch of dead giant cockroaches and skeletons. Not that you mind, staying underground for extended periods of time isn't that hard for you.
Nora tells you she's going to canvass the area and see if anyone's still alive in the area she used to live in, and coming back to get you out once the sun's down. That means you have some time to do... whatever, really, until she's back.
Deciding you may as well work on the one thing you used the most ever since you came here, you start to repeatedly cast your ice shard spell with the intention to enlarge and sharpen your summoned projectiles.
You don't really get them to be bigger by the end of it, but certainly sharper, and they end up flying a bit faster, too. It's a definite upgrade over what you had when you started.
It is by this time that the elevator comes back down, Nora standing there and smiling at you. Apparently, her family's robot butler, Codsworth, was still around and waiting for a sign of them (it is by this time that you give up on this dimension ever making sense). They'd searched the neighborhood together, but hadn't found anything besides some more giant insects, flying ones this time that apparently shot disgusting projectiles.
Happy to be moving up in the world, you step onto the elevator and arrive on the Earth's surface not long after.
So... this is the new dimension you found yourself in. Everything you can see from here is completely ruined, as Nora'd told you, but you think you can work with this.
Introducing yourself to Codsworth, the three of you take a moment to plan out what to do next. Nora wants to find her son, and Codsworth suggests to go to Concord for that, a small town not far from Sanctuary Hills (your current location) and seek help or information from the locals there while he keeps guard over the ruins of Nora's home.
You mention that as long as you can avoid the sunlight, you're fine to travel wherever and just hide during the day, giving you ample amounts of time to train (not that you mention this last part).
Ultimately, it comes down to how hard it will be to keep you safe during the day. As Concord's an hour on foot from here, at most, you should be good to go there, see what you can find out and either make your way back or find a place to lay low there.
"Actually, before we go on, this seems like a pretty dangerous world out there. How would you like to have some superpowers, Nora?"
"Uh, are you serious? I mean, anything that helps us in finding my son would be appreciated."
"Well, it takes a few hours of repeatedly feeding you my blood, but at the end of it, you get to be tougher, capable of shrugging off worse wounds, and get a copy of one of my powers," you smile at her disarmingly.
"No offense, but that won't turn me into a vampire, will it? I'd like to keep being able to do stuff during the day."
"Nah, that-" you blink, apparently, you can turn people into more 'vampires', though you keep on going, no time to ponder on this, "is not how it works. Turning people is considerably more involved. This is just me lending power to someone else so they can protect me during the day."
"Sure, anything that helps is good. I don't mind spending some time on this." she answers. Good enough for you, really.
Settling into the most intact house, the two of you spend a few hours chatting while you regularly feed her some blood from a shallow cut you made on your wrist via your claws. It's actually a nice way to learn more about her, especially as she slowly comes to trust you over the course of the conversation and/or thralling process.
It's a very subtle influence just about impossible to detect.
At the end of it, you have a new thrall, and your first one in this world.
"I don't feel any different," Nora states after you declare you're done.
"That would be because it's a passive effect, I think. From what I can tell, you're bulletproof now."
"You're shitting me."
"Nope. In fact, feel free to shoot me; bullets just ping off. For both of us, now."
It takes a bit of assuring her that it's okay to shoot at you to prove that this is a thing now. Eventually, she lets off a careful shot at your outstretched hand... and is absolutely baffled when, as advertised, the bullet just falls off of it without doing any harm.
"The same thing goes for you now. Anything that counts as a bullet is completely harmess when fired at you. Doesn't protect your clothes, though. You wouldn't believe how often I walk around half-naked."
Her face is a mix of disbelief at the great and terrible power you have and she now shares and that embarrassed blush she seems to get whenever you talk about nudity.
It's kind of fun, actually.
Unfortunately, the time it took to thrall Nora means you likely won't make it to Concord and back if it comes down to it, and neither of you wants to risk it. Consequently, you'll have to confine your activities to Sanctuary Hills and the immediate surroundings.
Deciding you may as well spend the time productively, you ask Nora whether she would like to train in unarmed combat and gun use while you clean out some of these houses.
She's confused for a moment before you breathe out soul number 10, explaining that you keep the souls of those you eat to use as minions. After a quick shudder, she pulls herself together and agrees, her and the old guy wandering off towards the river to set up a little shooting range with a few empty cans you'd already pulled out of a building.
Meanwhile, you and Codsworth get to know each other better while working, carrying the ruined furniture out of long abandoned homes and storing it inside the house with the workbench to be reused later and getting a bit of space freed up for now.
The robot seems to be keeping himself together, but the wear and tear of 200 years of isolation (he kept count, apparently) clearly took its toll, more mentally than physically. Which is a strange concept for you, both because you're perfectly capable of being isolated so long as you have something to stave off boredom, and because you're psychoanalyzing a robot.
Nevertheless, the two of you are doing some good work, getting half the houses in the suburbs done.
Night will be over soon.
As the night slowly starts to end, you consider where to spend the day. You could always go back into the vault of course, but it's a bit of a pain to have to get Nora whenever you want to enter or exit.
So you search for any decently intact natural or manmade caves or something along those lines, as the houses' walls and roofs are too compromised by wear and age to provide any decent protection. You don't get your hopes up, but hey, it's worth the effort to look around.
You even get Nora to help after you reabsorb your summoned minion.
Eventually, the two of you stumble upon the entrance of a root cellar one of her neighbors must've dug back in the day. Coming inside, the two of you are greeted with the sight of an old mattress, a few bits of food and miscellaneous stuff, including a gold bar, lying around.
Closing the door, you're pretty sure this would make for a fine lair for now. It's a bit cramped, but it would do everything you really need from a place to spend the day.
"Alright, this should do nicely," you say with a last look around the room you find yourself in. "It's secured from the sun and that's really all I need. Additionally, you won't need to operate that elevator every time the sun rises or goes down."
"You sure don't need much, do you? I mean, this is a literal hole in the ground," Nora teases you.
"Hey, don't knock it until you tried it. The hole in the ground I spent my first few days in after rising from the dead was part of the sewers, and it worked out just fine. In fact, how about you go ahead and sleep down here, the mattress looks like a comfier bed than anything I saw in the houses earlier."
Nora bites her lip as she's deliberating whether she should or not, before eventually giving in. "Alright, I'd feel better having someone keep watch just in case. I am getting pretty tired."
That decided, Nora lies down and stretches herself out to sleep, idly fingering the zipper keeping her vault suit on before taking her hand off of it and slowly drifting off to sleep.
That leaves you with a full day of time to waste and prepare for the trip to Concord.
Thinking back on unfinished projects, you realize you never got around to finetuning your ability to hear what's going on inside your inner palace, so you sit down next to Nora and concentrate on listening.
it doesn't take long until you got it down, also realizing the rhythmic thumping sounds you'd heard last time were some of your souls having sex.
Weak. Real people don't have sex, they fuck.
As you finish up, you feel a slight shifting sensation, similar to the last times you'd felt something like this, though still different. Quickly using your ability to see and hear what's going on, you soon find that a change is going through the halls of your castle. While the rooms and such themselves are unchanged, the halls connecting everything are getting cleaned up and fixed by a horde of identical maids acting in complete synchronicity, also leading you to finding what looks like an old armory filled with medieval armors. If your hunch is correct, you should be able to armor your souls up here before summoning them.
In fact, you take a moment to take a look at your tree while you're at it and see there are currently two fruits hanging from it, and time seems to be slightly sped up inside your realm compared to the outside. Perfect.
Breathing yourself in once again, you take a seat upon your throne and make a new universal decree. All souls are to come to the armory and receive an armor.
It doesn't take long to see the results, and find out more than you'd first expected. Your souls, upon being forced to make their way towards the armory, soon make contact with the maids, whereupon said maids grab onto them and teleport them into the grip of another maid near the armory.
Apparently, your maids can't only clean, they can also teleport stuff. Or maybe they're all synchronized like that because they're all the same maid, and they're just messing around with causality so that being grabbed by one body equals being grabbed by another one, therefore being over there or something?
They're pretty awesome, either way.
You get up and start on your way to the tree, though you'd already seen one of the maids waiting for you at the door to your throneroom.
"Where might we take you, master?" she asks with a polite smile. Pleased, you answer her that you with to attend to the fruits that grew on the tree in the time since you'd last visited it, whereupon she repectfully kneels and takes your hand, pressing a kiss onto its back-
and you're suddenly standing right in front of the tree, with what you suspect is another maid in the exact same position.
Nodding to her, you move to pluck the fruits and scarf them down with relish.
Feeling better and healthier after such an invigorating meal, you bid the nearby maid farewell and return unto reality, leading to you thinking about what to do next.
Well, you're going to Concord, and you have no idea what awaits you there, so you may as well tap into your magic and see what it gives you. Spying movement from the corner of your eye, you dart forward and snatch up a rat that was apparently living in here. Really, it's almost as if the universe is telling you to get it over with already.
Making some progress on figuring out the chant your magic is trying to convey to you and actually pronouncing it correctly, you still speak quietly so as to not wake up Nora, who ocassionally inches towards you in her sleep, usually followed by you laying a hand onto hers to make her calm down.
Bad dreams, you guess, though she gets better on contact.
The rat, meanwhile, is getting a little colder after your repeated spell attempts, which you take as a good sign.
Not much longer until sundown.
Deciding you may as well make the most of your time, you reenter your soul self and ask the maid standing by your throne room to fetch your sneakiest soul for you. To your astonishment, she does, making a grabbing motion and suddenly holding onto soul number 14.
Apparently, your maids actually know a bit about the souls inhabiting you.
Regardless, you order your past meal to teach you everything she can about staying unseen, spending a good bit of time on figuring out this stealth thing and making at least some progress, you reckon.
At least you know to move slowly and look where you step.
Ultimately, you send her off and breathe yourself out, waiting the last minutes until the sun goes down. Nora has apparently woken up in the time you were busy inside yourself, poking your face for a bit before you'd awakened.
Regardless, it's night now. Well, evening, really, but who cares. The sun can't send its cancer rays at you and that's all that matters.
Making your way out of the root cellar and say goodbye to Codsworth before setting off for Concord. To, hopefully, find people.
The roads are cracked and fucked up everywhere, but you suppose two centuries of no maintenance while nature eats away at them will do that.
On what looks like the outskirts of Concord, with the remnants of houses dotting the landscape, the two of you come upon a strange sight; two giant... mosquitoes, you think, slurping away at the corpse of two-headed cattle.
Why is it always giant insects?
Anyway, as they see you approaching, they take flight and seem to be intending to get at your blood, too. Which offends you on an intellectual, emotional and professional level. You are the bloodslurping abomination here.
Not wasting any time, you cast your ice shard spell and nail it right through the first giant bug, tearing through its abdomen and ripping off the bloodsack... though the fucking thing is still alive.
At least it seems to actually be wounded, rather than being capable of ignoring losing half its body.
Nora, meanwhile, opens fire on the other bug, but misses on account of the uneven footing.
This leaves you facing down the healthy insect while the other one is struggling to take flight again.
Meeting the charging insect, you smash a clawed hand into its side, crushing several legs, denting its carapace and damaging the wings on that side. It tries to stick its... thingy it uses to suck blood into you, but you evade it with relative ease.
Look, you aren't an expert in insect biology and you honestly don't care how this shit's called.
Nora, meanwhile, found her footing and sends a bullet right through your opponent's eyes. Which is impressive, given it's a bug. It drops dead on the spot.
That just leaves the two of you with one crippled giant bug to contend with.
It isn't even a challenge to mop up.
