Finishing up what you wanted to get done, you lay your head back as Slave sucks you off in your little lair, thinking about what to do next.
Finishing up your latest testing in the little workshop your soul palace gives you, you use the telepathy you trained recently to contact Kate, asking her to bring over the still sleeping gunners.
Once she arrives and throws them onto the ground in your lair, you summon the same soul you'd used to help knock them out.
"I need these incapable of escaping and requiring minimal maintenance, while still capable of being drained of blood regularly. Can you do it?"
Your soul just grins, conjuring a scalpel and a drenched cloth.
"With pleasure!"
You leave him to it, Kate watching with idle fascination how he makes the first incisions, hamstringing them in several strategic locations, while you go off to play with corpses for a bit.
With your schedule going faster than initially expected, you take some of the extra time to come back around to your earlier attempts at finally getting that damn soul mechanism working.
Finally, finally making it do... something, you mentally grab for the soul of that one raider you ate that was hopped up something fierce, breathing him out and causing him to writhe on the floor, seeming to scream, but without a single sound escaping his mouth.
It takes a few minutes for him to calm down a bit, all the while light slowly starts to coalesce from all over his body and onto his face, nestling around his forehead. At the end of it all, he has the tattoo of a stylized eye sitting squarely above his actual eyes... and it's starting to look around.
Huh.
Some testing following his recovery confirms that he can, in fact, see through his glowing tattoo eye, and that he can actually see more than is readily apparent.
Apparently, he can also see which way to go to arrive somewhere he truly wants to go, first leading him (when you allow him to follow this ray of light only he can see) towards where Mama Murphy is enjoying some jet, but when you tell him to lead you to other people and even things, the focus of the light seems to change.
This... this could be the key leading you to Sarah. You'll need to get everything in order, as you have no idea how long it'll take to arrive at her location, no idea where on the globe she might be by now, but you have a magical way to find her now.
Hold out, Sarah. Big Gabey is coming!
You want to immediately jump back to earth Bet, start to search for Sarah immediately, but you know that time isn't moving over there right now. You can use the time you have here to prepare. No matter how much you'd like to do otherwise.
Actually, you've been pretty hard at work for... a while, now. You can't remember taking a little time to yourself ever since you woke up in your grave. Come to think of it, while you memory of anything that happened since is pretty much perfect, you still have some trouble recalling what you did on a day-to-day basis when you were still alive.
Deciding you may as well try to recover some more of who you once were, if only so Sarah has an easier time once you finally find her, you settle into a corner of your lair and begin to meditate on your hobbies and personal experiences.
It takes you a while to remember, but slowly and steadily, you dredge up bits and pieces, letting you reconstruct your daily life to some degree.
There you go, taking care of your siblings, trying to avoid your parents, going to school... ah, something different.
One day, you took up a pen, a piece of paper, and began to draw. It wasn't good, it wasn't even anything you drew in particular, just you sitting in your room, before your siblings were even born, doodling onto this piece of paper with the most serious expression a preteen can make.
Then another piece of paper.
And another.
Eventually, you even got kinda good at it.
You took up to taking your drawing pad with you for little walks, trying your best to draw the scenery around you. It wasn't anything too great, your skill and talent for it mediocre, but still, over time you managed to recreate things you saw with some effort, all the while giving you an excuse to keep away from home.
Once your siblings entered the picture and your teenage rebellion consisted of taking care of them, you were too busy to do it as much as before, though you managed to sneak in enough time for the odd sketch or two every now and then.
Once they got a little older, you kept up the habit, little Sarah trying to mimic you, but soon giving up and demanding you draw her instead. Good times, you had a lot of fun needling her about it before sketching her and Rex in various situations.
You'd never really gone beyond just sketching things with simple pencils, not seeing the point in getting any deeper into art, given your familial situation, but hey, you may actually get back into the habit once again now.
Drawing Sarah once you find her again, that is.
With all of this cleared up and feeling more like you than you have for weeks, you ponder on what to do next.
Well, not really on what to do next, more on how you could leverage all the people currently living in Sanctuary to do stuff for you. May as well use them now that you've assembled them here, after all.
Emerging into the night, you go find a few people. First, Ada. You ask her to program your modified Mr. Handy template with a new name.
Yes, you think you'll make MINUTE (Mechanical Installations Now United Towards Exsanguination) your 'brand name', the way General Atomics used to be for robots pre-war.
Your particular two models shall be named Hammer (the one that shoots) and Sickle (the one that farms). You have no idea how anyone will react to this, but you think the big enemy for the USA was China, rather than Russia, so you just can't help but make the joke.
So, with Ada on her way to do some minor reprogramming, you turn to the other two robot workbenches, breathing out the souls you had help you when building them in the first place. Giving them the order to produce a bunch of robots once Ada is done, your next stop is to find Preston.
He isn't too hard to find, having just gotten up and getting ready to patrol Sanctuary... again. Stopping that before he can get started, you task him with taking some time to build a few of the improved laser muskets the two of you designed. Preston, for some reason really happy upon hearing this, gives you a thumbs up and gets to work.
With all of that taken care of, you march off to go find the trio of scientists you recovered earlier. Apparently also in the process of waking up, you wait until their (apparently usual) comedy routine is finished before approaching.
Asking them about what they're planning to do for a bit, it seems like their best plan is to build a specific radio beacon meant to let them connect to their homebase. The usual stuff apparently wouldn't work, as they ignore said usual transmissions on principle.
So, to get anything done, they'll need some decent materials and perhaps your help, as they're not used to having to repurpose literal trash to build things.
Their other suggested plans aren't even worth considering, honestly. Everything from using those workbenches to build a robot army and making all the robots scream their message really loud to engineering a mind control virus to make people help them get home... somehow.
You're not even going to comment on that.
"Okay, several things," you say, making them stop talking between each other for a moment. "First off, never go with the mind control virus plan, that's how you get a plucky resistance group immune to the virus out to assassinate you. Believe me, I've seen it a dozen times, it never ends well.
More immediately important, you'll need my help to do this. You're not used to working with literal scraps, you don't even have any of those scraps you'll need and trying to get them is pretty sure to end in your deaths. So, first off, let's see what kinds of trash we have lying around in the warehouse and where we can go from there."
Leading them into the place currently filled with your hardworking minions, you head into the storage rooms crammed to the brim with random loot.
"Now, let's see what we can do..." you say as you make sure to grab some paper and pens.
It takes a significant portion of the night and the following one, but you soon have a schematic put together that should, theoretically, do what you need it to once built.
The actual issue will be building it, given the brain parade isn't nearly as proficient in terms of practical building as it is in science and planning how to build stuff, but you're sure you can manage with some time and effort.
And hey, they seem to have actually learned a little about how to work with junk, so maybe not all hope is lost on them yet.
Well, it looks like this is taken care of for now. The three labcoats are going over the blueprints to make sure the completed product actually does what it's supposed to, so you'll leave them to it while you try to manage the rest of Sanctuary.
Speaking of which, you don't really plan to do much of anything outside the settlement for the next while, so you may as well have Nora and Kate go and scout the surrounding areas. Who knows, maybe they'll find something useful, maybe they'll take out potential attackers, maybe they'll find nothing.
Either way, better than having them sit on their hands at home.
So you find them, currently engaged in making Slave eat them out in turns, and tell them to take a day or two later to explore the surroundings with your deathclaw zombie.
"No worries, Gabe. Let's follow the waterway south for a bit and see what we find." Kate says while pulling Slave's head against Nora's crotch.
In a good mood at how your operation here is taking shape, you once more head into the workshop house, finding Preston currently elbow-deep inside an assembly of parts, a completed musket already lying to the side.
Asking Preston if there's anything you could do to help him with the whole Minutemen thing, he puts his work down for a moment and begins to think.
"Well, there's a few things I could think of, really. For once, it's a good thing that we did with Tenpines Bluff, and repeating that in other settlements would help. Just, going there, helping them and getting them to join up with the Minutemen at large would be great.
Beyond that, though, there's a lot of people that either can't or won't settle down anywhere because it's too dangerous out in the wastes. If we could manage to set up a radio beacon to let people know places are safe and accept new settlers, we could really build our settlements up into something lasting."
Well, that's good to know. You thank Preston and head on over to the scientists, asking them if their design is capable of sending signal along normal channels.
They take a short discussion, but ultimately, it seems like the changes needed would be minimal. You sure are glad you have someone around that knows a thing or two about how radios work, otherwise you'd be completely in the dark.
You spend the rest of your time, when it isn't daytime out anyway, on putting together that radio beacon. It's mostly physical work on putting all the right parts together out of just the right scrap, which is what you spend the majority of your time on, though you also have the labcoats helping you along. Your claws are surprisingly useful for this part.
Where they can't help as much is on the framework you do for the little tower made out of scrap metal. While they're enthusiastic about the project, you don't trust them to weld anything together without setting themselves on fire.
Aside from that, the work your soul does on your captives is exemplary. While he didn't have much to work with, he thoroughly ensured they aren't going to escape anytime soon. Lots of tendons are severed in several places, their limbs bound to their bodies, their mouths fixed in a slightly open position.
All they need to survive is someone feeding them some food leftovers every day and a small dose of buffout about once a week so their musculature and bones don't degrade too badly, keeping their blood production around the level of a healthy person.
It's not perfect, but still far more than you'd expected.
Of course, you waste no time on nibbling on one of them, taking enough blood to lightly sate you without risking accidentally biting into anything too important, keeping the other one for later to make sure you don't accidentally overfeed.
Now this, this is the life. Or unlife, as it were.
Alright then. A new night, a new plan. Or more like, making sure everyone keeps on being useful.
To that end, you summon that one Merchant's soul you think was pretty good as an administrator (or at least kept the other druggies on track pretty well) and introduce him to Preston, telling the former to teach the latter.
Nothing is guaranteed, but if Preston really wants to build up the Minutemen, he'll need as much experience and practice for organizing things as he can, and it's not like it costs you much of anything to keep his new tutor out.
In fact, you'd mention to Kate she should totally join in and see if she can learn anything, seeing as how she seems to have fallen into an administrative role in your gang back on Bet, but as she's busy for the time being, it can't be helped.
Speaking of which, it seems her and Nora found some kind of depot filled to the brim with useful shit. You'd sent them out again a day after they came back, seeing how more locations to scavenge is a great find in itself.
Aside from that, you decide you may as well keep on making good use of your mad doctor soul, so you summoned him after deanimating one of your supermutant zombies and told him to get familiar with its biology for a bit.
You'll get back to this in due time, but for now, it's time to practice drawing. Yes, you made the decision, now you're following through on it. You have some pens and paper in storage, thankfully enough, so all you need now is something to draw.
You start off with a pretty much all-consuming theme in this dimension; the post-apocalypse after the nuclear bombs destroyed pretty much everything. It's both straightforward and you have a lot of memories to reference the whole thing. Specifically, why don't you start with... Boston, destroyed as it is?
While you didn't explore it all that much, you can still totally take a few images of a street corner down. So, with your subject clear, you get to work, reproducing the decayed ruins to the sides first in broad, occasionally broken lines, then you add details wherever applicable.
You have enough inspiration.
At the end, you think you did pretty well. It took a decent amount of time, but you have several sketches of places you saw in and around Boston. Urban landscape meets postapocalyptic wasteland.
Sure, looking over them again, you can already see several places you could improve- a few pages where you got the focus wrong, and a few proportians you accidentally misaligned, but then again, this IS meant to be practice for you.
In fact, with this first round of practice over, you move onto the next thing you wanted to draw. The one thing you drew the most before your death, in fact.
Time to sketch Sarah.
You do manage to finish several pages, but... you don't think you'll analyze them like you did the others.
You'll just let them be for now.
Anyway, with that refresher of your drawing skills done, and considering it's daytime anyway... time to get to training, you suppose.
Inside your soul palace, you'd first spent a few hours on messing around with a few things in your workshop, but eventually the boredom overwhelms you. Thankfully, however, paper and simple pencils are included in this thing.
So you move over to another workbench, idly sketching a few buildings, before you realize you're drawing a sketch of Sanctuary. Amused by this little revelation, you decide to make something more of this; so you start sketching several scenes of Sanctuary as it is being rebuilt.
The river, with the water purifier jutting out of it, connected by a single cable to a small generator. The workshop building, some rooms filled with junk and Preston as well as a few of the other working inside, smiling.
The entrance to your little lair.
Eventually, you think you've really gotten this down. As in, you see little to no real mistakes. You still could improve, of course, but you totally could make it as a starving artist in some small town, heh.
... Somehow, despite all else you've done up to now, everything you have built up and the cool powers you have, this one thing fills you with pride in a way nothing else so far has.
Coming out of your palace, you take a moment to take a snack from one of the bloodbags before emerging into the night, the sun having just gone down. Time to get to work.
And with work, you mean that stupid radio beacon, though you're also thinking about building robots to help you build other things. They'll likely be rather limited to start with, but if you manage to let them build simple housing, preferrably sunproof, you'd already be satisfied. Your lair is getting a little crowded by now.
It takes quite a bit of work, as well as most of the night, but soon enough you can erect the mast next to the generator you're also using to keep the water purifier running.
Actually, you really should make a better one, now that you think on it. You could totally... ah, not the time. For now, you'd best just leave the three stooges to their little celebration (you did, after all, find some loose alcohol around mixed into your loot) and eventual proper calibration of the thing.
Now. Time to get on that building robots idea you had.
It takes you a bit longer than you'd hoped, but eventually, you manage to assemble a design that should work.
It is, once more, based on a Mr. Handy, but with a small nail pistol and a hand installed on the lower arms, along with the more typical buzzsaw and a hammer arm in place of one eye. You'd left the other two eyes in to let them better gauge what they're doing.
You'd originally planned to add much more cool shit, but unfortunately, it turns out that, while the workbench does point out any glaring design errors, smaller things still can and will add up to turn the thing you design into trash.
You'll have to recycle what's left of your first try and sent you back to the drawing board later.
On the other hand, you're actually fairly proud of making the robots capable of taking simple materials and turning them into something else. This first design is more to let the bots build and maintain houses made of several different materials, and you're confident they should be able to do that.
Detail work is a whole 'nother story, though. A thought for the next few generations, you suppose.
Oh, you nearly forgot. The model needs a name.
Finding yourself with some time left over, you decide to try and analyze the sentry bot you still have lying about.
You're making good progress, though there's a lot of robot to go through.
With your other projects either dealt with or on the backburner for the moment, you return to your deanimated supermutant.
It's been quite dissected, but a thorough application of your Twist Corpse spell lets you put it together again.
...Somewhat, at least. You may have a few leftover pieces, but hey, you ain't no expert on anatomy. This corpse will just have to deal.
Summoning your mad doctor soul, you proceed to use the giant crab zombie you brought with you by taking it apart slowly. You'd do it faster, of course, but your spell has throuble affecting big body parts all at once. Another idea for later, you suppose.
Regardless, you then move on to transplanting parts. You have to spend a lot of time on twisting the shell so it fits around the torso properly, but at least it's not too complicated or anything, and after a few spell applications to properly bind it to the skeleton of the mutant, you have a fairly well-armored zombie.
Of course, it's not perfect. You didn't manage to stretch the thing to cover the head, and it as well as the legs are fairly unarmored, but still, this should grant this thing some decent survivability. Then again, you're not quite done yet.
That said... you're not done yet. There's a whole bunch of body parts you haven't used yet. So, deciding to get a little creative, you take a clawhand from the crab and use it to replace most of the mutant's left hand, hopefully giving it a painful grab attack.
Your zombies can't use weaponry yet, so why not give them natural weapons, after all.
...Of course, upon thorough testing of the reanimated end result, it turns out the thing can't actually control the claw. It'll still jab it into enemies when ordered to attack, but it seems to lack the ability to move the appendage itself. Disappointing.
On second thought, maybe you should've expected this. The way crustacean nerves and weirdly mutated mammal nerves work should be different, right? Asking your mad scientist results in agreement.
You suppose you may have to modify the spell to let you work on useen shit like that better. Ah well, at least the shell worked out, in no small part thanks to the examination your mad doctor soul conducted beforehand, letting you avoid breaking the carapace as soon as the zombie started moving.
With your little date with the insides of the sentry bot finished, you spend a little spare time on improving your cold magic, already planning what to do over the next few days in the back of your head.
Okay, time to, once more, delegate. That one Merchant soul is doing good work with Preston, and he seems happier in general lately, you you'll just leave that be and give them more time to work for now.
Nora and Kate came back earlier, actually, they mentioned something about meeting a guy that wanted to start a settlement or something in an old flooded quarry to the south-east. They actually used the deathclaw to dive down and do some underwater work for him, apparently.
And then shot some mirelurks (so that's what they're called) when their nesting grounds were disturbed. Good work, all in all.
Beyond that, the settlers around, having some free time with the farming bots taking up a lot of the slack on producing food, have been helping out on making more bots, resulting in a good two dozen robots of the Hammer and Sickle designs, as well as a handful Bob bots. Thing is, you're actually starting to run low on several of the parts necessary to build more, so they're taken to helping the Bobs work on giving the houses in Sanctuary a proper set of walls and roofs.
In unrelated news, the beacon you have set up actually attracted a pair of new settlers. They seem to be awestruck by the bunch of robots taking care of most things, though you're starting to think you may need a few more water purifiers... or a better model of them, anyway.
If you do go out of your way on that, may as well get a better generator. The current one works fine so far, but you don't think it can support much more than it currently is.
But anyway, time to send the girls off to work again while you take care of the household.
First, you'd decided to really pursue the arts with your new talent on the topic, thanks to your vampirism. Now, the natural next step to sketching is painting, only you may have trouble getting any decent paint in this dimension, or in others that you may visit sooner or later.
So first, time to figure out how to make your own paint. It may take a lot of time and effort, and it may give you far less to work with than modern civilizatio can, but it's something. And hey, maybe you can actually turn that into a plus, who knows?
So after you're done digging into and playing with the dirt outside the palace, trying to mix it into something useful before it gets regenerated back into the ground, you telemaid back into your throneroom, sitting back and thinking for a moment as you survey the place.
...Actually, couldn't you use this?
Moving over into the workshop, you start to sketch out places and scenes you saw throughout your realm. Deep, dark forests and jungles, mountaintops tipped by single buildings, cavernous caves extending farther than the eye can see... there's a lot of cool shit in here, even without going into the artistic value of the palace itself, with long, winding halls and ruins stretching further than even a whole continent should allow.
You have a good time putting just a few of these things on paper.
Well, at the end of your first effort to build sentry bots following the schematic you divined by reverse-engineering one, you have two brand new sentry bots patrolling the settlement, for now.
You've also learned a lot! Namely, that fusion cores, while usually quite robust, should still be handled with care, especially your homemade ones. On the plus side, though, the explosion to your face didn't really damage the bot, amazingly enough, and you quickly regrew your face afterwards.
But anyway, with that taken acre of, you decided to avoid any more possible explosions for the time being and retired for the day into your lair with your art supplies, spending a few hours sketching the scene of Nora and Kate riding off into the wasteland on your deathclaw zombie.
You may have embellished a few things in a few of your sketches, but that's alright. Artistic freedom and all that. And honestly, who wouldn't be whooping with joy at riding one of these things?
The wounds you faithfully recreate on the deathclaw just enhance the sight, you think.
Well, with all this taken care of, you decide you really need some more materials. Raw junk of almost all kinds, really- those sentry bots, while not exhausting your supply of trash, did take up a significant amount of it.
It's a lucky thing you took all those robots the Mechanist made down, otherwise you're not sure you'd even have had enough for these two. Sentry bots really take up a lot of material. Then again, they're also essentially a smart tank, so it's probably worth it.
Anyway, time to get to scavenging. And when you say scavenging, you mean going to places the girls scouted out and taking everything not nailed down from there.
Well, time to get to work. You assemble a bunch of your Hammers, then go find the two sentry bots and tell them to wait together with the other bots. Lastly, you go take out your zombies, and off you go, following the description the girls gave you to find the place.
Fairly soon, you've arrived at the Wicked Shipping Fleet Lockup, taking a moment to marvel at all the shit stored here. Two warehouses full of miscellaneous stuff, a few trucks, and a bunch of ghoul corpses.
Those corpses are in remarkably good condition, though perhaps you shouldn't be surprised. Everything that was going to rot off of them likely did so centuries ago anyway. You're not sure how much use you can get out of this pile of rotting flesh, but whatever. You'll manage to recycle them somehow.
Alright, first things first, the smaller stuff. While your Hammers can't really carry much weight at once, they still can carry some, and they can glide pretty much straight northwards, over the waterways, to reach Sanctuary much easier than the rest of your group.
So the first thing you do is have everyone with actual arms carry any small stuff out o the warehouses, getting started on packing everything up in small packages for transport. Luckily enough you thought ahead and brought bags with you this time, rather than trying to make 'em from local materials.
It isn't long until you send half your Hammers off, while the other half awaits their cargo. It's a strangely fun time you're having, actually.
With some space cleaned out, it has become apparent that the ghoul corpses are starting to get in the way, so you have them dragged out where they lie inside and piled up nearby. Now, while you certainly could just ignore them, several ways to actually use them come to mind, even as you have the zombies tear the buildings apart so you have an easier time taking literally everything along.
Well, no time like the present to try this out. Though you may as well summon your medical advisor soul, just in case he has any unseful input on this.
So, breathing him out, you briefly tell him you're going to fuse a bunch of ghoul body parts together to see what happens before you get to work, secure in the knowledge your sentry bots are keeping the perimeter secure and your zombies are continuing their work.
So, starting to cast your one spell over and over, you proceed to literally pull the ghouls apart limb from limb, before you (carefully) fuse two torsos, heads included, together.
Your soul seems to be fascinated by the process, occasionally starting to dissect the fused parts before you twist the cuts shut again while working.
Once you're done and feel the bodies won't come apart at the slightest pull, you start adding limbs. Just four arms and legs where they'd normally connect, then another arm next to each one you've already got.
When you eventually raise the thing you've thrown together, it takes a few moments to orient itself, but soon stands on its four legs, waving its eight arms around when you order it to help the other zombies taking everything apart. A full success!
You do feel you could've done more if you had a way to connect spines together to eventually make feelers made of spines connected to more limbs, but you didn't find a way to do so that wouldn't involve each spine being its own, uncoordinated thing, so this will have to do now, at least until you can modify them to connect to each other.
Aside from your little funtime of playing with dead bodies, the work you're actually here for proceeds smoothly.
Once you've got everything stored away back in Sanctuary, you think about paying a visit to that place, Thicket Excavations, where a guy apparently wanted to found a new settlement.
You're kinda curious about how this kind of thing usually works for people who are not you, and maybe you can set up a trade thingy or even talk them into joining the Minutemen, after all.
Gathering your group for this particular excursion, you move on out of Sanctuary proper over the bridge and keep to the south-east. The description the girls gave you of the way to go is decent enough, and soon you approach what you're pretty certain is the quarry.
The giant blocks of stone behind a fence are a decent indication, you think.
Except, you note to yourself as you approach the opening in the fence you were told to use, this place looks like it's populated by raiders. Well shit.
At least you brought some reinforcements along, you suppose.
Bidding everyone to stop, you tell them it looks like there's a decently sized group of raiders instead of the small group of settlers you were expecting.
Preston nods grimly. The summoned soul looks uncomfortable. Your robots beep-boop at you. And your zombies groan a little.
Right, everyone's on board. Now how will you do this? From what you remember the girls telling you, you can expect a few enemies overlooking the quarry itself, as well as a pretty deep area probably full of more radiers, with a small area before that you expect to have at least a few guards.
"Okay, everyone, here's the plan. I'll sneak in first, take out any sentries and shit. If it gets loud, assume I've been spotted and attack, I'll make sure they can't defend themselves in that case. Otherwise, wait until I come back and we can shoot down on any enemies down in the quarry with impunity."
With the plan clear, you turn into your shadow and glide through the dark. Time to do this.
Gliding through the raider camp, you first take a look around. Seems like these guys actually kept mirelurks in marked off areas, essentially keeping them as livestock. That's a good idea; you may steal this idea later.
Beyond that, though, they use a few trailers, either for storage or as shelter from the elements, with a few shitty huts deeper in likely their actual living arrangements. One raider is keeping watch over the entrance in just such a small hut built atop a trailer, with a turret likely doing all the actual work.
Another one is keeping watch over the mirelurk pen, though he seems to be nodding off as you watch. One is actually sitting on a ledge far above the rest of the area, a hut behind him and the stairs upwards behind a pair of raiders camping out under a wooden roof their group apparently put here.
Okay, so in order... you first get up those stairs, which feels really weird in your shadow form, as you're technically in pieces due to how those metal stairs have gaps between each step, but soon, you've arrived and materialize for but a moment, grabbing onto his face to block his mouth and pulling, throwing him to the ground with some force and knocking him unconscious.
With that taken care of, you shadow and 'jump' down the ledge, gliding along the wall and slithering off to the sleepy guy, taking him into a chokehold from behind, then apply a similar treatment to the guard with the turret, just barely keeping him from making any sound and getting the thing to notice you.
Dragging him off, you once more shadow and go to take care of the last two raiders, one of whom is asleep, making it a cinch. Mow all that's left is dealing with that turret...
Luckily you just so happen to know a thing or two about how these thingies work, so you just have to lay your hand on the right place, pulse your bioelectric powers, and there you are, one completely fried turret.
It'll even work again with just a few new vacuum tubes.
Still, with this taken care of, you take your time to walk out and towards your group of meatshields minions, waving them inside and telling them where to go.
It doesn't take long until everyone's in position, so you start things off by shooting an ice shard at a raider from your perch atop your mirelurk-mutant thingy.
Hey, it's a solid option for this, okay? Gives you a better field of view and everything.
So, anyway, this next part is pretty much a shooting range for your group. Preston is doing some great work with his musket, the scope you added to the design actually proving its worth. It takes him a bit to crank it, but every hit is a kill, pretty much.
Your Hammers, meanwhile, while not as accurate as him, are numerous enough one of their shots eventually has to hit something, and thanks to how the integrated muskets work, ammunition isn't an issue for them.
You suppose they'd become more dangerous due to massed fire the closer you get to a group of them, but that sure isn't happening today. The raiders are dying too fast, and given the way they have to approach one at a time due to the way the quarry was constructed and a handful of them approach at a time at most, you basically only have to wait for all enemies to die.
Like fish in a barrel, really.
Now all that's left is to painstakingly go down there and get the loot up here before you can take it back to Sanctuary. Unless...
Casting Freeze and shoot! really quickly, yup, the last raider hiding in one of the huts at the very bottom is now also dead. No idea what the sneaky little fuck wanted to try, but it's not like you care, either.
Anyway, for now you just order the zombies to do what Preston and his soul tell them to, then have them oversee the actual work, making sure to mention you want the corpses, too, just to make it clear. Meanwhile, you go on ahead and prepare that turret for transportation and drag the knocked out raiders onto one spot, just so you have them here for later.
The Hammers, meanwhile, patrol the perimeter, as they can't really help yet due to having to hands or applicable tools for this, just laser arms. You can still have them carry light loads later by tying them to them, but yeah.
Well, you do happen to have a reliable soul handy for just these occasions, so you summon your mad doctor minion and order him to interrogate the prisoners, about everything from how this raider camp came to be to who they, personally, were.
Any and all information. You don't have to listen to it yourself, after all, just ask about anything that you want to know from your summoned helper, so there's no harm in being thorough. He seems to appreciate your attitude in this, for some reason.
Anyway, with that in secure hands, you head on down to where the work group is busy taking everything even vaguely usefull or reuseable, so you can start a conversation with Preston while that other soul keeps on overseeing the undead.
What follows is a short exchange of words, thoufgh you eventually come upon the topic of the apparent mirelurk farming the raiders attempted.
"I'm not too sure about this, Gabriel," Preston says when you breach the topic. "Mirelurks are notoriously temperamental and likely to kill anyone they can the moment they get free. While I suppose it may be possible to perch them in, actually farming them would be... a challenge."
"Then again, they would be a reliable source of meat for our people, as well as a further deterrence aganst attacks if used right. We'd just need to get them to breeding." You answer.
"Yes, it could be they'd be worth the effort... we'd have to be careful, though, and they need lots of dirty, irradiated water to really grow."
Excusing yourself from the conversation after a bit, you wander down to the bottom of the pit in order to take a closer look at how they were keeping the mirelurks.
It's not much to look at, if you're being honest, just a barrier of some kind to keep them in one place and a door, presumably to let the keepers come in to harvest them after killing them, barred by a few literal bars from the outside.
Worthy of note is that the pens are actually filled with a small layer of water, so Preston's comment seems to bear out- they need dirty water to live. That's not actually too bad, you think, if anything, their natural aggression is the bigger issue here. Not insurmountable, by any means, just something to be careful of.
Grabbing the corpse of the one guy that was hiding down here, just to look like you're actually working, you head on up again.
Taking your time as you ascend, you search through the stuff the raiders kept in a little workshop area they had in a small room dug into the quarry, but aside from a few circuit boards and weapons, you find nothing especially worthy of note. Maybe because the raiders just recently established this camp? Who knows.
Anyway, it isn't much longer that you arrive back where you started, with your mad doctor currently in the process of dissecting one of the raiders alive while repeatedly asking him questions faster than he can answer.
Looks like he's doing good work, taking care to really show him how his wiggling makes the muscles in his feet and legs move under the skin.
Bidding your interrogator to tell you what he found out after waiting a bit to make sure he's done with this one for now, he happily smiles and goes through them one by one.
The first seems to be a real fucker, by what he can tell you, spitting and scratching the best he could even while paralyzed from the neck down. Judging by what he said, a special psychopath even among raiders that liked to cut people's genitals off after raping them.
The next one, average for a raider through and through, though he seemed very apathetic to your minion. His job was to take care of the mirelurks.
Number three, the only female one. She nearly got out of her ropes before your guy decided to just apply anaesthetics to everyone he wasn't busy with. Dangerous, that one.
Number four, real shithead. He seemed to be trying to bluster and intimidate, at least until he screamed like a little girl once he started losing toes.
Lastly, another fucker, with the bodybuild of a brawler according to your soul's experience with human anatomy. You're not going to question it.
"Okay, so here's what we're going to do. Number one and number five are food, two and three are recruit material and I want you to prepare four just the way you did the last ones I left in your care."
It isn't much longer until everyone is awake, though still bound. Letting your minion proclaim their fates (he seems oddly elated about going all ham on them), you step over towards where everyone in the 'eat' category lies.
Lifting the struggling raiders up by their collars, you bite deeply into their throats one after the other, even as your minion starts to work on the screaming future bloodpack.
Laith was a dangerous psychopath, but you knew that already. What you don't know, though, is that he had a collection of organs he cut off or out, spending a few hours just masturbating over them every now and then.
He disliked having to replace them once they really started to rot, but hey, he could always get new ones.
Jace was a right shithead, but at least he was better at his job than that crazy fucker, Laith. He, at least, just raped and killed people, though not always in that order.
Having to share the same fate as him pissed him off to no end, even beyond the arbitrary choice of who got to live and who not.
Dropping the two bodies, you move to watch the procedure as your soul first permanently paralyzes your future bloodbag from the neck down, then binds the limbs together, fixates the mouth in the proper place, etc.
Getting bored of the show, you turn towards your future recruits. "So, you two will be working for me from here on out. I actually want to replicate this mirelurk farming thing, which is why you," as you point at the apathetic one, "are still with us."
Pointing at the other one, you continue "You, on the other hand, impressed me by being marginally less useless that the other fuckers in this camp, so you get to shoot things for me. Deal?"
It's almost too easy, you think to yourself as she agrees. Or maybe you just have a feeling for things like this thanks to Kate? A thought for another time.
It takes a bit longer to get everything ready, but soon enough your little group is off to Sanctuary. You have to shoot down a few giant insects, but that's so normal to you by now you don't really pay attention to it.
Regardless, soon enough you're busy unloading the loot, including the pile of corpses. Your new recruits don't seem to be particularly phased by this, you note, though you don't really care one way or the other.
Once everything's stored and everyone situated, you go and meet with the labcoat trio, asking how things are going.
"We're making progress, but it's slow progress."Those idiots are ignoring all the wavelengths we've tried so far!"
"To be fair, we were expecting that."
Huh. Looks like they need more time to get anywhere. At least they aren't making any trouble while they're busy, you suppose.
Happily meeting with the girls (and having a threesome in your lair), they regale you with stories about how they met two different raider bands that mistook them for members of the respectively other one, leading to a swift bitchslap in bullets (Kate's words) once they managed to fool them into letting their guards down.
They're quite amazed when you tell them about what became of Thicket Excavations, and once you're all done they get you to go through the corpses you brought back with you. Identifying the guy that got them to help him (it's the one that was hiding at the bottom of the pit), they're quite exasperated, though you do mention you found a decent lot of loot in their camp, so it was probably for the best.
Later, Preston approaches you, having thought about your idea on farming mirelurks like you saw the raiders do, and explains how he thinks it would be for the best to turn the raider camp into a settlement and use it as the central mirelurk farm once your network of settlements is secure enough to have regular shipments of meat go around.
...but really, how did he find out you were planning to get more settlements to fall into line in order to build a semblance of civilization? Weird.
You first enter your castle to relax a bit and draw something, but you just can't summon up any inspiration, no matter how much you try.
And you do try for a few hours.
The next two days you're coming inside you just flirt with the palace maids instead, finding this to be a very welcome change of pace, especially as you later find out they all blushed at once, and when you next enter, you finally manage to find something to sketch again.
Sure, it is the maids as you saw them working throughout the castle, but hey, it works. They also start to blush all over again when you show them your finished sketches before leaving, which is a win in your book.
Outside your soul castle, you took some time to assemble a scavenging party consisting of your trashman soul, a handful of your Hammers and a few of the newly arrived settlers, lead by Sturges.
You sent them ahead to secure that robotics disposal ground, considering the sheer amount of random parts yet to be taken out of it. Of course, it is quite possible that more of those Mechanist-made bots will come around in another attempt to salvage the same stuff you want, but that's why you sent so many relatively well armed minions with them.
Beyond that, though, you're also making things easier on them by having Preston set up a secure supply line to and from the scrapyard with some more of your bots, patrolling the route in threes and fours.
Should suffice for just about anything in the area, you reckon.
The soul you had tutor him, in the meanwhile, is being put to use by overseeing your MINUTE Bobs as they get to building several simple houses and repair the old ones.
The entirely newly built ones are pretty spartan, but still, much better than most wastelanders ever see, let alone live in.
Lastly, Nora and Kate, along with their pet deathclaw zombie (you'd been overruled, they've adopted it now) are taking some time to scout out Concord, meaning they're going through the ruins and shooting anything that moves before marking any worthwhile loot to be picked up later.
All in all, you feel you're making good use out of what you have... and with any luck, one of the houses will be sunproof soon-ish, so that you can move your lair over. Space is getting to be kind of an issue in your hole in the ground, and you've been somewhat hesitant to just dig it bigger, having no idea about how the pipes underneath these houses look like.
Though you have to put the construction work on hold for a bit during one night, as you decide to avail yourself of the help of your mad doctor soul when you start actually using some of the corpses you accumulated over time.
Calling all your zombies currently in the settlement together, you ponder on what to do, before you decide to just smash a few things together and see how it turns out.
So you take one of your supermutant zombies, deanimating it and putting it next to the pile of human corpses you have lying in a pile. Well while you can't exactly do it as freely as you'd like, you first start by separating several of them into limbs, heads and torsos, before you then fuse the limbs onto the respective limbs of the supermutant.
Repeatedly.
Once you have a decent amount, you begin to do the same with the torsos, slowly creating a bloated monstrosity with bulging arms and legs, though you managed to have a layer of thick skin over the whole thing, rather than letting anyone see how it's actually made.
It's actually pretty big, so big that you had to have the other zombies drag it outside halfway through for fear of not getting it out without wrecking the place midway through.
For the finishing touches, you take a few of the heads you took out at the start, putting them on to of the bulging mess that are the shoulders. You only have enough space for three, and the end result has no neck, but then egain, it's not like it really needs one, now does it?
Oh, and the supermutant head you actually removed while you were doing the arms, just to have enough space.
Ultimately, you kinda doubt anyone would willingly take on this horror you just assembled. Once you reanimate it, its gait is slightly awkward and you can clearly see how several things are moving under the skin every time it moves (which you know to be the individual parts making up the whole), but it is extremely tough, strong and heavy.
You doubt even a rocket launcher would really phase this thing.
Overall, you've made a lot of progress over these few days. Lots of training, lots of progress. In return, you didn't do much of personal interest, though the frequent telepathic exchanges with Nora and Kate were quite enough to keep you content.
That, and the knowledge that every bit of training you can pile up will make you just that much stronger in the long run.
On a side note, your stay in this dimension is nearing its end. You can feel it.
Over the two times you had sufficiently sped up time inside your soul palace, you go on anhead and keep on flirting with the maids.
In fact, you make a game out of running from one maid body to the next, each time making the maid collective blush just a little harder as a whole. It doesn't help if she knows you're coming, after all, if she's still just as vulnerable to your tactics.
In fact, at the end of it, you think you've actually learned something about how to do this. Or at least the maids are collectively blushing just that much harder.
Meanwhile, you went ahead and make Preston take a closer look at that old quarry. His idea to use it as a mirelurk farm may just pan out, after all, so you have him and the soul you've taken to pairing him with lead a project to settle the area and figure out how to do this.
Helping them in this endeavor are the raider you caught there that seems to have some experience with the topic, a few miscellaneous robots, including MINUTE Sickles to augment their food intake by turning a small area outside the quarry into a farm and several of the settlers that have arrived by now that seem enthusiastic about the project.
Of course, the pair of MINUTE Bobs along for the ride will be crucial towards building some proper housing, and a few of the Hammers for security are always a good idea, but yeah.
In the meantime, you'll be off to do some work on some little projects of your own and, of course, training.
Most of your time for the next few days is spent on creating an automatic manufactory to build laser muskets for you. It is something you haven't seen yet, an entirely new kind of machine for you, but you have an idea or two on how to start.
Robots, after all, can move around, make simple distinctions and all that crap. So your first step is to program a robot that automatically builds small/simple things, which you've already done with the MINUTE Bobs.
So the next step is to do the same thing, just with specialized tools and fixed in one place rather than having the robot wander around, followed by changing the chassis to be a metal hull and one materials intake as well as a place to get the end result out of.
Honestly, the hardest part was programming how to build your laser musket design into the manufactory, though thankfully Ada was around to help you on this part.
You may have also spent a lot of time just memorizing the code, both for this thing and the robot workbench you used during the creation process, but hey, whatever. It'll be worth it soon enough.
Ultimately, you have one big fat box, inside of which all the magic happens, with an opening and an exit, both of which have a conveyor belt letting materials be drawn in and finished laser muskets spat out once the internal mechanism is done.
Afterwards, you also went and tried to make a self-destruction mechanism for your muskets, but you'd spent too long on getting the manufactory running to go beyond a few simple ideas and testing. Totally worth it, though.
This thing will change the world! Or at least let you mass produce technology beyond anything Earth Bet has. Or also technology it does have, it works just as well for that once you give the internal mechanism the correct tools and materials after programming it in.
Come to think of it, you'll need to make a connected terminal computer to switch between programs and make controlling this thing easier. An idea for later.
For now, you're still too busy being satisfied at what you did.
Making some great progress on tinkering with the mechanism that lets you improve your past meals inside your soul (you spend a moment on thinking about how you likely should be careful with this, as it's literally your soul you're changing on a whim here before you shrug and continue on), you eventually, after several days of effort, get everything to click in a way you'd only felt before when you first managed to make it work in the first place.
Figuring this should be enough to get a result, you carefully feel inside yourself, once more getting that same feeling you always have when you improve your soul-related powers in some way. Wasting no time, you breathe yourself in and sit on your throne to take a thorough look around.
Mhm.
This is, uh, a pretty big change, all things told.
Your hourglass filled with sand that allows you a more precise control of how fast or slow time goes inside here is now connected to a fairly complex mechanism, one that reaches all around it and up.
And up. And up. And up.
In the place your hourglass used to be embedded amidst a bare room without even a door, an enormous tower stands, covered in clocks of all kinds and consistently telling the time, as well as, from what you can tell, the flow of time in relation to the outside reality in some areas.
This is a monumental tower, really. It fits right in with the rest of the palace in terms of sheer size and scale, but what really puts it apart is just how this enormous building is filled with precise clockwork that will never stop working exactly as it is meant to, telling anyone that wants to know everything about the time as it relates to your soul palace.
And, unsurprisingly, it gives you more control of time in here, as well.
After your big improvement, you mostly just take a little time to fiddle with whatever hits your fancy, but soon enough, the time approaches.
Time to go home.
You make sure that Kate and Nora are with you, and the three of you pass the time by having a little sex marathon, so when you realize time's almost up, you pull your dick out of Kate and your tongue out of Nora before you tell them, followed by both of them flexing their legs and pulling you in again.
You suppose they have priorities.
Anyway, the three of you keep up your three-hour threesome until the very last moment, though your constant body contact still lets you 'hook' into them, taking them along just fne.
With a loud pop, you and the girls reappear in your lair.
