"So, that just happened," you tell Nora, eyeing the corpses littering the area. "Is it just me, or are there giant insects behind literally every corner nowadays?"
"I know what you mean. At least these ones didn't shoot you with their excrements or something like those giant flies did."
Silently shuddering, the two of you resume your trek until you hold up a hand, concentrating.
"I'm hearing something. Shots fired, and... something else I can't make out."
Readying her gun, Nora nods to you. "Lead the way."
Approaching a bigger intersection, you and Nora come to see a bunch of people dressed in rags, some of them screaming incoherently, shooting at a man firing down from a balcony with... a laser musket. An honest-to-god laser musket.
Fuck your life.
Well, at least these savages here are using conventional weapons, meaning you're still immune to them. Small mercies. Except for the few you see toting tire irons and knives instead of guns, and just... these guys do seem pretty fucked in the head, overall.
The continued screaming doesn't help your opinion of them.
Thinking up a quick strategy, you nod to Nora and then towards the corner of the intersection, where the crazies can't see her. Getting your drift, she retreats behind it and waits for what you do next with readied weapon and baited breath.
You, meanwhile, openly stand in the intersection and start casting. Freeze water and shoot it at my enemy!
Unfortunately, your target moves just when you fire off, merely grazing his shoulder and leaving a painful looking wound.
In response, three of these crazed fuckers turn towards you, leaving two more taking potshots at the man on the balcony.
Two of them, including the one you just grazed, bear shitty and improvised looking guns, opening fire in your direction without any apparent care about how badly they miss more often than not, but you pretend to be hurt and get behind the intersection's corner, opposite from Nora.
She nods towards you, apparently having divined the gist of your plan. Once the enemies come through, the two of you will attack them from both sides, using your immunity against bullets to attack with impunity.
Taking him down with relative ease, you keep a tight grip on his arms as he struggles pointlessly, opening your jaw wide and biting great wounds into his neck from which to draw blood even as his compatriots shoot at you, fruitlessly.
No idea whether they keep on shooting you because they don't have any better ideas on what to do or because they're too dumb to notice the bullets don't even inconvenience you, but you don't care so long as you get to eat this guy.
Nora, meanwhile, lands a solid shot into the side of one of these guys, leading to him opening fire on her... and missing, again.
These guys really have shitty aim.
Ziggy, born into being a raider and loving it. Got good in a fight so he'd always have a way to take stuff from others. Dislikes his boss' massive consumption of drugs, but not enough to say anything about it.
Dropping the corpse, you turn to the two fuckwads that actually kept on shooting at you, though one is now shooting at Nora. Completely uselessly in both cases, not that they seem to care, though the one paying attention to you seems slightly unnerved by how you just ate his comrade.
Making a grab for the next victim, you discover that his struggles soon lead to him being pretty much embraced by you. Looking deeply into the cloth sack concealing his face, you smirk in a way that seems to make him distinctly uncomfortable... Until your head rears back to let you bite into his neck with your unhinged jaw.
It still makes him uncomfortable, just in a wholly different way this time.
Rickie just did what he was told, mostly, though he didn't mind the raider life too much. Liked shooting stuff and didn't particularly care what that stuff was.
Throwing the body to the side, you are greeted by the sight of Nora ramming her gun into the last sucker's face and shooting.
There's not all too much of a face left afterwards.
"So," she begins after the defaced psycho drops, "that's how it looks like when you eat someone, huh?"
Looks like she's getting over this suprisingly well.
With a complicated expression, she continues "I'm feeling way less bad about what we just did to these people than I think I should."
Ah, there it is.
"My first guess? These guys were screaming psychopaths that tried to kill us without thinking. You're just not really considering them people and so you don't really care what happens to them. Alternatively, maybe you're still so emotionally charged by what happened in the vault, you're just not up to feeling bad about stuff you do. Or maybe you're just a bit of a sociopath, I mean, I am, and I'm feeling great."
Looking pensive, she starts when you add: "But for now, we should go take care of the rest of the idiots before they manage to shoot that other guy shooting them."
With a nod, the two of you are off.
Rushing into the intersection, the two of you take a stand, Nora in order to fire at one enemy, you to cast your ice shard spell at the other.
Shooting your ice shard at your chosen enemy, hitting him in the side before you close in on him, just before he turns around and comes at you with his visibly worn baseball bat.
Nora, meanwhile, keeps on shooting at the one armed with a gun. You ignore that situation for now, not like him firing bullets at either of you is particularly worrying.
Once he's in arm's reach, you smack aside his bat before he can swing it and grab onto his arm, pulling him towards you so as to hold onto his opposite shoulder before ramming your jaw full of teeth right out of some psychopath's demented dreams into him, cracking his collarbone and drinking your fill.
Ross, chem maker for the gang. Didn't really feel like a raider for the most part, he just made the chems to help get everyone high. Once he was juiced up, he screamed and hollered just as well as the others.
Dropping your victim, you turn around to see the rather one-sided firefight between Nora and the black guy with a cowboy hat against the last raving lunatic.
He really, really didn't make it long.
"Hey, up here!" Thank you, Capitain Obvious. "There's more raiders inside and I got a group of civilians holed up at the top floor. Grab the laser musket and help us!" as he points at the corpse of a similarly dressed person with a copy of his weapon.
Guess their group had some casualties already before you arrived. At a guess, the 'raiders' showed up while their group was passing through and they conducted a fighting retreat into the nearest intact building.
Regardless, Nora nods at you, takes the musket and what looks like a few pieces of fitting ammo scattered around it and prepares to enter the place.
Time to do a thing, you suppose.
Holding your finger before your mouth, you signal Nora to stay quiet. The both of you sneak into the room to the side under the soundcover of shots being fired upstairs, though you don't hear that distinctive sound laser muskets make.
Speaking of which, Nora is currently cranking the handle to the side of hers. Seriously, handcranked laser weaponry. Good thing you'd already given up on this whole place making sense.
Making your way through a few rooms, apparently this used to be a museum and american independence was what the current exhibition was about, the two of you slow down and hide as you enter a room with two of these raiders inside. One of them has a shotgun, the other one what looks like a billiard queue brandished as a weapon.
Jumping from behind cover at the guy toting the shotgun, you grab onto him as the both of you tumble onto the floor. Once you're relatively sure he can't point his gun anywhere, you ready yourself to eat him, before his buddy comes over and tries to shove you off of him with his billiard queue while shouting "Get offa him you shit!".
It tickles a bit.
In the meantime, Nora is lining up her shot on the billiard dude.
Only to miss, blasting a hole into a mannequin off to the side.
Great, now you're thinking about the S9.
Fuck it, time to eat.
Dustin, asshole and all around raider. The only reason he wasn't the first into the fight usually was that he's lazy as fuck, despite being a great shot. Usually too busy beating whatever captives the gang currently had to get better, though.
Getting up, you leave the corpse of the man you just ate where it is as you face the other enemy in the room. He, now realizing he's up against you and Nora, screams and charges at you like an idiot while she's cranking that musket of hers.
However, just as his swing comes around to you, you jump to the side, narrowly avoiding getting smacked.
Nora, meanwhile, stopped cranking and is now loosing another shot at him, now that you're not so close a missed hit might get you instead.
Except she, once more, misses him when he jerks towards you. You'd missed it earlier, but you're pretty sure these guys are high as fuck.
All the better for you to eat them, really. Now, though, you still have to murder this fucker so you can move on already.
Getting seriously fed up with this guy, you throw yourself at him in a whirlwind of claws. In quick succession, you ram a clawed hand into a shoulder (you don't care they're not that sharp, you just push them hard enough and they cut just fine), get a painful whack to the head by his billiard queue before you use your other hand to cut into his weapon arm, followed by tearing the first hand out of his shoulder and smashing your claws into his chest and face.
A few times.
Eventually, he's learned the lesson that the only good enemy is a dead enemy and dies. You've wasted far too long on this fucker anyway. Nora looks at the scene strangely when you glance over at her, though she goes back to normal very quickly and moves on together with you.
Emerging into an open area, you realize that this used to be the stairs giving access to the higher floors, but either age or damage tore a big part of the building down. Either way, you can see another raider in the open area overlooking the entrance you and Nora came through, as well as another one one floor higher.
Making it upstairs without a sound, you consider your enemy. You could come at and grab him from behind, or you could jump him and ride him down a floor, maybe even onto the other enemy if you aim this right.
Deciding against anything unnecessary, you just sneak up to and grab him before he has time to notice you, secure your grip and drink your fill, tearing a plethora of wounds into his neck.
Sweet, sweet blood. These psychopaths are a great lunch, if nothing else.
Stanny, raider and casual monster. Like most raiders, really, except for being somewhat better with a gun than the rest.
Dropping the corpse, you peer downstairs to see how Nora's doing.
Well, she seems to have things well in hand for once, shooting a hole into his chest, though he seems to have survived that one, followed by a shot to the head.
Making it explode.
Calm down, Gabe, even if this is not how physics work. He's dead, that's all that matters.
Waving Nora upstairs, it seems like there's only two more raiders alive in the building from what you can hear. Both of them are another floor up from your current location, right next to each other.
Time to end this.
Ascending the stairs and taking position next to the door leading to your targets, you and Nora nod at each other before acting. Bursting through the dooer and taking a few steps forward to let Nora take aim in peace, you recite the chant and fire an ice shard at the losest enemy before they really have time to react.
Nailing him through the shoulder to the door they were banging on before you'd arrived, disabling him until he tears himself loose... and losing a lot of blood in the process. Did you hit an artery? Jeez.
The other one approaches you with a bat in the meanwhile, even as Nora fires past your side.
Blasting into the door next to the pinned raider harmlessly.
Once you have a bit of time again, you're SO making her practice with a gun.
Meanwhile, though, you have a raider to contend with, and another one still trying to get that shard out of himself.
Grabbing the guy closing in on you and slamming him against the wall like a ragdoll, his struggles start far too late, when your jaws are already closing around his neck.
He never stood a chance, really.
Nolan was always... different. And not in a good way. Where other raiders would kill and rape and take because they felt better for it, he did it because he enjoyed the suffering of others. That's not to say that sadism wasn't a widespread raider trait; on the contrary, even. It's just that Nolan took it a bit further than most.
Where they would literally rape women to death, he'd make it a point to stop before they died and let them recover a bit before starting at it again. Of course, that soon bored him, considering they all died of hunger soon after anyway, and so he decided to find a way to make his victims last longer.
Now, stimpacks did the job just fine, but they were also expensive, so young Nolan, barely even 16 (not that anyone bothered counting) went and managed to grab the doctor of a settlement they'd taken over before the others tortured him to death for the fun of it and forced him to teach him all he knew. Once he was reasonably certain he got everything out of him, he tried out what he was taught on the doctor until he died, getting the practice to the theory he'd already obtained.
With his newly-won knowledge and skill, he got the others to respect him as the guy that would sew them together and pull bullets out of them after a raid. Naturally, this was not his original goal, merely a pleasurable side effect. And it was indeed rather pleasurable to slowly work on captives, hurting and changing and reshaping them, healing them as often as needed.
"Sedatives," Nolan would often say, "are completely unnecessary if you got a few good shackles on hand."
Naturally, he also learned how to create chems of different kinds and exactly what effect they had on people and their insides. Quite interesting indeed to directly observe a brain as mentats take effect, for example.
Full sex changes were quite doable with the correct materials and a bit of time, though Nolan quickly got bored of that. He eventually managed to create a serum that would turn anything the affected experiment feels into pain, making raping them doubly sweet.
No matter how far he got, he never forgot his roots, Nolan did.
Eventually, Jared, who happened to lead the band he was part of at the time, let something drop about an old woman capable of seeing the future when under the influence of certain chems. Nolan, always up for finding out more, was quite interested- whether it was true or not, he'd get a new subject to experiment on, and he was rather bored at the time, so he volunteered to be part of the group that would go and grab the little convoy she'd been sighted with.
He had no idea a far more interesting subject would literally blindside him...
Throwing the body down to the lower floors, you turn towards the last raider in the building, rapidly paling and still struggling to tear himself free.
Nora, meanwhile, shoots him.
Hitting him to the side of the stomach, the two of you just watch as he bleeds out from the massive bleeding of his pinned shoulder and the shock takes care of the rest.
"Well, that's that. I suppose," Nora says. She looks at you, seemingly still conflicted over feeling so little about how the two of you just brutally murdered your way through a dozen men.
Not that it really matters; she'll get over it in time.
For now, the door opens, letting you into a room positively smelling of fear. You're greeted by the visage of the black cowboy dude you'd seen shooting from the roof earlier.
"They're all dead?" he opens up with, earning a nod from both you and Nora. "Took 'em all out," you add to make it clear for the others you can't see, but hear moving around inside.
"Good. That's... great. I'm Preston Garvey from the Minutemen; a group of us was escorting civilians this way, but we were attacked by these raiders when we arrived in Concord. Only problem now is, the rest of these bastards showed up while you were busy inside, I couldn't really hold them off anymore. So we need to get rid of a whole bunch of them before they flood in here. Good news is, we have a plan to do that. Sturges?" he asks, motioning to the guy in a coverall, evoking thoughts of a stereotypical mechanic.
"There's an old vertibird, crashed on the roof. Pretty old, pre-war and all. Got a power armor on board. Bad news is, the thing's been outta juice for 200 years- we'll need an FC, a fusion core, to drive it. The things were used as batteries by most greater corporations back in the day."
"There should be one in the generator all the way downstairs, but we have no way to get at it. We need someone to pick the lock or hack the terminal controlling it," your first interlocutor explains.
"I'm good at repairing things or putting them together if damaged, but I have no idea how to even start breaking into a terminal," Sturges adds on.
"Alright, we'll take a look," Nora says, the both of you sharing a look and starting to make your way downstairs to see what this is all about.
Coming down, the two of you see what Sturges and Preston were talking about; a closed door barring the way towards what... may be some kind of generator? You're neither an engineer nor an electrician, so you'll just assume so for now. Next to the door, you see the terminal they mentioned; the transition towards these cludgy things when compared to proper computers may take some time.
"Okay, there it is," Nora says. "Now how do we get at it?"
Thinking for a moment, you tell Nora: "Okay, so we have no idea how to hack a terminal, either, do we?" At the shake of her head, you continue "So we'll have to pick the lock, but while we could eventually get this opened, we're not exactly professional burglars. Luckily enough, I ate one a while back, so give me a moment to vomit him up and we'll see what he has to say."
Ignoring the look Nora gives you, you breathe out soul number 3. It's really been ages since you ate him, him and his buddy were your first meal after that guy at the graveyard, if you remember correctly.
And you do. Not like you forget stuff anymore.
"Hey there, Soul Number 3," you begin, ignoring the looks both of them are giving you now. "We need this door opened, but apparently someone forgot to leave the key behind after the local apocalypse. Could you take a look and see if you can open the lock?"
Not really having much of a choice in the matter, he does, taking just a moment to look back at you and say "Looks easy. All I need is something to use as a lockpick and a minute or two."
Now... where are you gonna get a lockpick from on the fly?
Smiling when a solution to the problem appears as soon as you think about it, you begin to cast the Ice Shard spell against a nearby wall, only to then pull the shard out of said wall (with moderate difficulty; this is pretty hard) and begin to run your hands over it, making it longer, thinner and a bit blunter.
Your audience looks on in amazement at your magic trick. With your smuggest smile, you hand your improvised lockpick to your minion and tell him to get to work. Doing as he's told, you and Nora stand back for a moment.
It doesn't take long until the door is opened, your past meal back in your belly where he belongs and the fusion core in your possession. Making your way back up, you idly mention the two of you should go through the building and take anything of use off the corpses once you've taken care of the situation outside.
"On the one hand, plundering people's corpses is a bit much. On the other hand, the world is apparently an apocalyptic wasteland, so we may very well need to. Guess I'll just see how it goes," she answers your suggestion.
Soon, the tow of you are back in the room with the group of survivors, Nora idly throwing the core up and catching it in her off hand.
"Okay, you got the fusion core. Now you just need to insert it into the armor and the thing should be good to go," Sturges smiles, looking like he's just seen the first shine of hope in years. To be fair, he might've, given the way the other people in the room are looking like.
"Alright, let's do this," Nora says to you, leading the way towards the door giving access to what used to be the highest floor a few centuries ago, before half the building was torn down by what you now know is a 'vertibird'.
Emerging into the night air, you immediately see the power armor you're here for. You're... not impressed. You'd seen power armors in pictures before, of course, tinkers are a thing on Earth Bet and you'd studied parahumans in depth, and while you hadn't expected a shiny machine the likes of which Armsmaster would don, you hadn't exactly expected a visible frame with a few missing pieces letting you see the insides of the whole thing, either.
Then again, if these people actually used to mass produce them, it would make sense to have several basic pieces you can slap onto a frame for a finished armor.
Beckoning Nora onwards, you let her take it. She's significantly squishier than you, so she gets to have the armor. That and you're fairly sure your supernatural strength wouldn't really work inside a frame that replaces your strength with its own, so fuck it.
Slamming the FC into the back of the frame, Nora pulls on something and the armor opens up, admitting her inside before closing around her again. Taking a few steps forward, she uses her armor granted strength to rip a minigun out of its socket in the vertibird. So, let's see how well this thing will do.
Arriving at the ledge Preston had been shooting down from earlier, you're greeted by another five raiders led by what looks like their leader. Or at least one of them that wears even less than the rest and seems to command respect, so you'll go with that for now.
"You fuckers sure did a number on my men," he screams up at you, before Nora sighs and says "Come on, Gabriel, we don't have all day to listen to these idiots," before jumping down, letting her armor disperse the force of her impact and opening fire at anything that moves.
Now, what shall you do in the meanwhile? You could jump down, but you're fairly sure the fall would hurt you pretty badly... unless you landed on something, or rather someone, soft. Alternatively, you could always just stay up here and shoot Ice Shards down at targets of opportunity.
Well, only one way to get your part of the fun, you suppose. So you measure the distance to the apparent leader of these idiots, taking a few steps back to let you build up some momentum before you start running.
And JUMP.
Flying through the air for a long moment, you make a perfect landing, meaning throwing your target to the ground and breaking more than just a few bones, you're fairly sure he wouldn't live very long even if you didn't kill him now. Not that that stops you from driving your fangs into what's left of his lower neck, draining delicious lifejuice with abandon.
Gristle, raider from birth and good at it. He loved raping and pillaging so much he put actual effort into it rather than lying high in a corner most of the day.
Ironic, then, that Jared, the boss, seemed determined to keep on taking chems until that third eye bullshit he was always blabbering about happened, but hey, he's the boss, he can do whatever he wants... until someone else becomes the boss, anyway.
Gristle was gonna do something about that, but for the time being, he had to do as he was told, and if that means taking a group to catch some suckers including some old granny Jared was into, so be it.
Except, when Gristle led his group to the place they were last sighted, he found more than he'd ever bargained for...
Leaving the broken body of your latest victim where it lies, you survey the battlefield. Nora apparently already shot two of the raiders full of holes by the time you finished drinking, leaving only three of them alive.
You and Nora open fire, you with another Ice Shard, her with her minigun. In short order, you mow down one of the raiders and heavily wound another before he can react, leaving one man and one woman standing between you and having taken care of this. They're still shooting at the both of you pointlessly.
That's when you feel it. A vibration along the ground. Something is banging into the ground from below, a short distance away! Well shit, of course this had to become more complicated than it had to be.
Carefully moving away from whatever is hitting the ground hard enough for you to feel it from this distance, as more distance is most likely preferrable in this case.
Casting your Ice Shard spell again, you're happy to note that it kills the wounded raider while Nora opens fire on the last one... who happens to be moving towards where the vibrations coming from.
Which, as it turns out, is not a good idea.
With a screeching sound, an enormous, roaring mass of scales and muscle barrels out of the ground, tearing through the street and turning your last enemy into a fine red paste.
Looks like you're in for an actually tough fight!
Breathing out, you summon soul number 7, his shockwave fists should at least do some good here, while chanting your Ice Shard spell and aiming for the... thing's knee, driving it deep into the side of it, as you can't get a good angle to hit it from behind.
Nora, meanwhile, opens fire again, but it strafes her line of fire, taking only minimal damage as it moves around in an effort to get at you, thankfully slowed by your kneeshot.
Keeping up the constant barrage, you and Nora continue to whittle this monster down as your minion tries to strike it... and misses. You're not too surprised, this thing is FAST, even with a crippled knee. Your own shot sadly only scraped a part of the knee rather than cripple it outright, and Nora can't get a good bead on it, even as it lashes out with its tail to blow away your summoned help and closes in on you, raking its claws through your stomach.
It looks almost surprised when that fails to bother you.
Still, you do not like this situation. this thing is strong, fast, tough and brutal. If you were a biotinker or something, you'd be close to tears of happiness a monster like this exists.
Deciding discretion is the better part of valor and that you aren't too keen on letting this thing turn your insides into your outsides any further, you back away and start running.
The others can work on this big fucker, if it stops concentrating on you, you'll see about keeping on shooting.
In a valiant effort, Nora steps right behind the charging train of reptilian muscle and opens fire, massively wounding it and weakening the legs further from your earlier strikes.
Enraged, the monster turns around, only for your summoned minion to slide right between its legs... smashing his fist between its legs, triggering his shockwave effect.
It just stands there for a moment, stunned.
Which is enough for you to turn around and recite your chant once again, aiming for the knee you'd only strafed earlier, thoroughly crippling it and throwing the monster onto its knees.
You unsummon your soul, its job here done to your satisfaction. Now all you need is you and Nora shooting it until it fucking dies already without letting it come into range by dragging itself towards either of you. Which it does, right up until it dies.
This thing was fucking tough.
Coming back into the museum, it seems like everyone assembled in the entrance hall.
"That was incredible! The two of you just went and took out a deathclaw! And... your guts are hanging out," is how Preston greets you. To be fair to him, that 'deathclaw' was not gentle on your insides.
"Don't worry, this'll be fine after a nap or two. So, anyway, where was your group going? I doubt anyone's really around Concord right now."
"We were coming to try to settle down in Sanctuary. Mama Murphy saw the place in her visions and we had no better idea on where to go, anyway, so we decided to come this way."
What comes next is something you'd expect to be plot exposition out of a shitty movie plot. These guys used to be way more, bla bla, coming to the prophecied holy land, bla bla, an old woman with the 'third eye', bla bla, tells the protagonist where to find their fate.
To be fair, you yourself are magic bullshit, so you aren't gonna call her a liar the way that one karen does, plus the way she's shivering whenever you look at her directly does give her credit as someone who at least knows more than the rest of these idiots.
So, anyway, apparently they're gonna try to settle down in Sanctuary Hills. You're not inherently opposed, you don't give a shit, and Nora seems like she doesn't mind, either.
So, these guys are going to live in the dump you were thinking of using as a base for now.
