You pop into existence with your full collection of companions chosen to come along for the ride in the middle of the basement of the house you had your robots build last time you were here, everyone naked, disoriented and stumbling around for a moment. The ways they act are actually quite interesting in themselves, now that you take a moment to observe.

Kate is the first to find her footing, her muscular legs flexing as she takes a quick look around. Next to her, Nora takes a deep breath, stretching out a hand to steady Cupcake who is immediately floundering with her arms wheeling in all directions.

By comparison, Isabel just takes a moment to sit down on the spot, closing her eyes and looking like she's trying to psyche herself up. And as for Taylor…

Taylor stands completely still, eyes tracking faraway things even as she steals glances at the naked bodies of everyone present. "There's a lot of insects around."

"Well, this whole world is basically a flea-bitten hellhole," you shrug, giving Isabel an apologetic look. "No offense."

"None taken, it's completely true."

"I'm feeding the fleas to the rest of the swarm first," Taylor declares, doing her usual expression suppression thing. "There's a few large cockroaches living in small tunnels under this place."

You knew you should have killed the ground with fire before you started rebuilding this shithole. "Feel free to make use of them. Now then, is everyone ready to go get clothes and get going?"


You are, as you sometimes like to call it, in the zone, riding on a rush of time inside your inner world orchestrated by your Timekeeper and his continuous effort to 'gather enough time' to enable you to spend quite a few more hours in here than you should be able to.

Time you use to get to drafting plans and making a few prototype parts to make the things you're changing and adding fit together properly without screwing up the rest of your designs.

Simply put, the last time you were on Earth Fallout, you didn't have many of the abilities and much of the knowledge you have gained ever since. That means you have some upgrading to do and the first thing you thus work on are the robots you need in working order sooner rather than later, given most of your standard bots are already more or less up to par.

So, the ST33Ds. Robotic horses for the Minutemen to be all heroic and cowboy-esque when they ride in to save the day. They're fast, meant to carry them through the wasteland and get them where they need to be without revealing your massive teleporter banks. Now, after what has to be at least five hours of ordering Yoshi around to do menial research tasks while you worked on making everything fit without ruining the aesthetic, they're also capable of flight thanks to a quickly integrated Lutece Particle device designed to be easy to replace or take out and re-use.

Those things do take a lot of resources to make, especially on Earth Fallout where certain heavy metals are a tad bit harder to get than what you'd prefer.

Oh, and you also put in an ion matter cannon, set in the front of the things' chests and capable of up to 90 degrees of movement to fire a persistent beam straight downwards for obvious reasons.

In summary, you added a whole bunch of machinery, mostly by moving around and redesigning internals as necessary, to make the robots initially designed more as vehicles for single Minutemen flying vehicles that can also disintegrate most threats. Because that's totally what they needed.

Oh, and you also went ahead and looked over the Torpid blueprints saved inside the lab's computers. A bit of reinforcing and a central cross of beams to stabilize the platforms at the core of the platforms with legs that you later added more parts to is all it takes to allow you to add even more flight capabilities.

All in all, it's a good few hours you can work in peace… Aside from the obvious, that is.

Such as Indigo. "You really should reconsider getting some actual therapy. I'm not saying from anyone in here, but… in general?"

"I am perfectly fine as I am, so why would I waste time with that?"

"Yes, indeed. Sanity is a matter of perspective, one could say," Rosalind Lutece agrees, sitting back as she adds a few of her own designs to your internal databank on all things Lutece Particle. It's decent work, you guess.

"Like a coin or a medallion," Robert ponders aloud.

"Except also not, for it has more possibilities than two."

"And yet the point stands. Perspectives."

"Possibilities."

"Limited, but unending."

"Limitless, but bound by circumstance."

"Are you two just going to stay in here nonstop now or what? I thought there was some actual radio silence between us," you complain. their bickering can get a little distracting, especially when you actually know what they're talking about and can't help but want to add your own two cents.

"We are."

"And we are not."

You just roll your eyes. Seriously, this pair of twins…


Once you're outside of your mind again, you take a moment to look over your little group to make sure they're all ready for action. They… pretty much are, so you don't waste any effort with fussing over getting everyone enough guns.

"Okay, let's get right down to work. First off, we'll need to update the local manufactories and their systems. You good to take care of that, Isabel?"

"Uh, yeah, sure, no problem," she agrees with a nod. You did clear this up with her beforehand, but it's just prudent to remind her, you feel. "I have the updates prepared like you told me, so it's just… plug'n'play for that. The rest is just using their own systems to improve the machines themselves. Mind if I start with the old factory?"

It doesn't particularly surprise you she'd trend towards that- she was living in the old RobCo facility for quite a while before you paid her a visit. "I'd prefer it if you went through Sanctuary first, actually," you still tell her. "Just in case we need something made here on the fly. Feel free to wait with Concord for a bit, though, it isn't like they need the advanced stuff anytime soon."

"Y-yeah, yeah that makes sense."

Good, that is most of the whole manufacturing sector taken care of. You'll still need to essentially recycle all the robots you have deployed right now, but at least you have this part of the process delegated for now.

"Next off, Taylor." The girl snaps attention at your mention of her name, staring at you mostly motionlessly. As she usually does, truth be told, and at least she only has a couple of flies swirling around the room compared to how she sometimes spreads entire swarms around in unfamiliar situations. "I'll be busy with preparing for vamping you, but in the meantime feel free to explore the surroundings for any useful bugs to add to your swarm."

She nods, focusing elsewhere again. Before you forget it, though, she really does look good in that tight vault bodysuit she's wearing, it really does accentuate her figure.

"What about me?" Cupcake demands, stretching a hand up to call for your attention. "Anything I'm supposed to do?"

"You just sit tight and take stock of the facilities, use the manufactory to make any tools you'll need and get acquainted with the local resources," you wave her off. You'll have a large amount of test subjects for her sooner rather than later, but for now she'd just bet not get underfoot.

"Which brings me to the next point. Kate, Nora, either of you want to help me round up a few raiders for later?"

Kate grins, exchanging a glance with Nora who gives her a small shrug. "I'll go, sounds like fun."

"I'll take a look around Concord in the meantime," your very pregnant wife says with a gentle smile. "Catch up with Preston and see how it's coming along. Just let me know when it's time for Taylor, I'll definitely be there."

It's kind of cute how Taylor's already been adopted by your wives.


One of your many, many advantages in having access to your inner world is the ability to summon out pretty much anything you can make yourself using the materials specifically meant to let you do so, if at an annoyingly high cost in terms of summoning capacity, as you usually consider it- if summoning or overlying a single soul takes one 'slot', summoning any one of your guardians takes up a full five, while the various objects you've summoned as of yet usually take up anywhere from one to three.

The customized bullhead you had Yoshi make way back on Remnant after you came to the decision your own flying vehicle always being on call is, as always, ready to be used, then, exhaled at length as a great cloud of the usual silver mist and taking up a full three of these rough measurements of your capacity. That said, while it does lack a few key features the real version possessed, such as not having a minibar and only limited on-board entertainment systems, it does serve you quite well in flying across the wasteland, keeping an eye out as you let your massively enhanced senses do their work.

You can see the mutated wildlife roaming the area as you move towards the east in a more-or-less straight line, everything from these molerats digging through the ground to the double-headed, bald cattle the locals refer to as Brahmin and, of course, lots and lots of bugs all over the place.

Having the ability to just… perceive blood, straight through walls and however far you could otherwise see, is once again incredibly overpowered.

Kate, on the other hand, is just sitting back and idly chatting with you; that is, right up until she sidles up to yourself and pulls the pants you're wearing against your better judgement down.

"What's bringing this on?" You ask with a raised eyebrow, amused.

"I know how you do your best work," your girlfriend slash wive grins, showing you her extended fangs, the sharp rows of teeth just looking really good on her… And then she kneels down, elongated tongue slithering along your rapidly hardening cock as she gives you head like only someone that doesn't need to breathe can.

You'd like to claim you don't spot a large congregation of warm, living bodies within five minutes of Kate deepthroating you, but that'd be a lie.


The site to steer your bullhead to a stop above is an old, ruined apartment building in the western outskirts of, as the map you put into this thing calls it, the western Malden region, basically everything so far east of Concord it isn't really quite under your control but also close enough you could send people and robots into the area with ease.

Most of your robotic expansion effort has been focused towards Lexington's direction, with you some way north-east of the ghoul-infested city at the moment, incidentally.

Now luckily, you have been training with your esper power a good bit, to the point a smaller building isn't too much effort for you to target. And while this apartment complex would be too large for that, that's only if you take into account the space it would have occupied if not broken down and mostly unusable except for a few of its floors.

"You ready for some action?"

"Always," Kate nods, deftly setting her weapon up and shifting it over into sniper mode. "You go in and gather 'em up, I shoot anyone trying to run in the knees?"

"Sounds good, just make sure you use lasers to cauterize the wounds."

"Pff, don't need to tell me. Shame I can't use real bullets, though."

"Or grenades or heavy artillery?" You ask, knowing where she's going.

"Oh hell yeah. There's just something about the recoil and blowing shit up with something that actually pulps and explodes everything that can't be beat."

"There's a reason I use my claws, you know." Aside from them being always on you and some of the best weapons you could imagine, that is, but that's beside the point and all. "Good shooting~!"

With your last well-wishes, you leave Kate behind in your stationary bullhead, opening a door to both get out and let her actually fire on anyone or anything trying to get out of the building with a decently angled field of view and all.

As for yourself, you aren't exactly about to take any risks. A few quick gestures has you leave cyclone traps at every entrance you can see, just to be sure Kate gets a good shot when they're slung upwards, then you move right on in, tearing the first intact door you see out of its hinges to let you get right in on the group beyond.

Which happens to be a dozen or so raiders, hanging around and not doing much of anything of import (taking drugs, fiddling with weapons, beating each other, the usual raider stuff). When they see you, complete silence overcomes them, the scum gathered before you likely not used to strangers coming in in this manner.

"Hello everyone," you thus take the time to greet them. "I'm sure you'll be happy to know you're actually getting to be useful for once in your lives. Now surrender yourselves so I can take you prisoner without damaging the goods too much."

Half a dozen guns are raised at you, but you just gesture lazily with one hand, increasing the push of gravity in the area by about two and a half to three times and immediately lowering them again.

A well as their wielders. And everyone else in the room.

"The fuck-"

"Shitface-"

"Kill-"

"Now, now, please don't get too agitated," you advise them, concentrating a little. This is a complicated procedure you're pulling right now. "You're going to die soon enough no matter what you do, so why bother?"

If anything, the curses and invectives uttered by pressed voices and painfully weak struggles against gravity only grow more hurried. Ah well, you tried.

More importantly, you've done the same thing you're doing here all throughout the building, carefully avoiding the ground of each floor as well as the outer walls. Most construction isn't done with possible sudden increases in the weight of literally everything in mind and tearing down this whole place with the bloodbags you want still inside would be counterproductive.

Not to mention the centuries of damage even after the nukes went off. Case in point, you hear a long, drawn-out groan followed by a loud crash elsewhere in the building- the stairs just went out in one area.

No problem for you, though.

"Now hold still, I'll need to immobilize all of you properly before we can move on."

"Fuckin' psycho, 'm gonna-"

You take that as a request to go for him first, so you step towards the raider in question, carefully putting your boot right on his elbow and looking him straight in the eyes.

"I like the initiative," you say and stop negating your own gravity.

Your foot punches straight through flesh and bone, bluntly severing the arm and crashing through the floor as well, making you click your tongue in annoyance.

A quick pull later you're back on normal ground, blandly ignoring the now crippled man's screams as you take advantage of the severed limb's blood which now isn't part of a living being anymore, technically, while simultaneously using hemokinesis to also stop him from bleeding out from where his lower arm used to be until just now.

It's actually impressive just how ruined the stump looks, with warped and bent bone indicating which direction you stomped on it from.

"Oh, don't be a crybaby," you say, rolling your eyes and speaking loudly enough the wheezing screams don't drown you out. "It's just an arm. It's really nothing compared to what's in store for you."

Nevertheless, you have what you wanted, quickly forming a sharp spike of blood hovering in the air. It's so sharp, in fact, that he doesn't scream any louder when you puncture his other elbow and both his knees, essentially making the limbs useless by cutting into the joints.

Then you turn around. "Now make sure you don't move too much unless you want me to miss. Then again, a few more blood donors are always welcome…"

The bleeding from the quick and painful incisions you perform is relatively low amount, but still enough you leave the room with a full quartet of floating blood spikes trailing behind you together with the laments and hate-filled cursing of the people you took the stuff from. Time to go through the rest.


Jim Hardney recoiled, biting his teeth so he wouldn't retch on the spot. This sure did explain why the people in this settlement had been so welcoming, but also insistent none of them came into the 'cookhouse'.

Hardney was the leader of a squad, sent all the way out into the wastes on the report of one 'Domas', a newly integrated citizen of Concord that'd had a few things to say about the places he'd crossed while wandering the Commonwealth before finding refuge in the newly established city. They sometimes got things like that- people came in and, whether they stayed or not, they'd talk about things they were asking about.

Most settlements out in the wastes were reclusive and mistrustful of anyone their people saw, with good reason- raiders, crooks and worse were common, not to mention the possibility of some wanderer being followed by something decidedly less friendly even if they didn't have any malicious intent themselves.

That said, sometimes you had places that did well for themselves, well enough they'd not necessarily invite anyone to stay, but at least offer them something clean to drink and eat, maybe a bed for a night or two before they moved on. Wasn't like there wasn't any good in people's hearts whatsoever, most were just afraid and wary.

But this… Well, Domas had said it. Said he'd found this settlement and was invited to stay for a night, but the way people looked at him had tipped him off. Survival instincts, experience, however one wanted to call it, he'd taken one look and known something was up.

He'd also been starving, though, so he stayed, but investigated the location. And what he'd seen, the same thing Hardney had, had him run without looking back, not that the man could blame him.

Hardney had joined the New Minutemen because they'd promised to do better, to be better, than the ones before them. The place he'd lived in when he was a boy had been some dirt farmer settlement, not unlike this one on the surface, but they'd been raided too many times too quickly, until they couldn't give the raiders anything anymore because they didn't have anything. When he'd heard the shots ring out, having been sent out by his pa and ma just in case, he'd known that something, anything, needed to change.

Couple years of wandering through the wasteland as a scavenging good-for-nothing much like Domas had professed to be later, he'd heard the Minutemen were back, were coming back in force, so he'd come to take a look.

Then he'd seen Concord, had spoken to the new General Harvey, then there he was. With his own brand-new laser musket and a couple of the guys.

Which brought him back to the there and then. He'd led a few trips, patrols around the major streets the traders took near and around Concord, to take out anything threatening, including small swarms of bloodbugs and even one group of supermutants, proving the power of their weapons. He'd even been to other settlements, making sure they were alright and offering them Concord's support, and pulled a guard patrol or two around Abernathy Farm and Thicket Excavations, the two places the city was receiving most of its food from aside from… Sanctuary.

This was the first time he'd ever seen the sheer vileness some people sunk to.

On the table he was looking at, he could see a half-intact body, a man hacked up into pieces after being bled out like a piece of meat. Because it was. These people- they weren't even trying to at least farm or trade, they were deliberately trying to get people to stay in their settlement to eat them.

Cannibalism was the dirty, disgusting little secret when the hunger came. Some people resorted to it, some would rather starve. Hard to say anything about that one way or another. But he hadn't seen a single starving person around when they'd come, introducing themselves as outriders of the Minutemen.

"Oh. You shouldn't be here." Hardney gave the room inside the 'cookhouse' as they called it one last look, eyeing the blood-crusted instruments and the body slaughtered like a brahmin, with almost no 'meat' around its thighs and back that he could see.

They'd taken the best bits first. Left the rest for later. Most likely in case they couldn't get any fresh 'meat' to eat instead.

He whipped around, poking his weapon right between the eyes of the cannibal raising a rusted knife. He looked the thing in the eyes when he blew up its head.

"Minutemen!" He screamed, to be sure his men heard them. "Take everyone down! Now!"

They were supposed to take prisoners when feasible. It wasn't always, and sometimes they had to shoot raiders down before they could shoot them down, that was just how it was, but if they could, the Minutemen were supposed to take prisoners and bring them back to Concord.

Not, notably, if someone looked at them wrong. Raiders and worse only. If the communities they were interacting with had a problem, they could solve it just fine themselves, only sometimes asking the Minutemen for help in arbitrating or mediating problems.

But if someone did something so wrong they couldn't be allowed among the people, they were taken and brought to Concord for their fates to be decided. It wasn't a pretty thing anyone liked to do and General Preston tried to keep punishments as light as they could be compared to what someone did, but sometimes…

Well, wasteland justice was another name for bullets for a reason.

Hardney looked around the city wall, spotting the sight of a pair of fellow Minutemen standing guard with the uniform robots always ready to fire at anything threatening. Until now, nothing had so much as reached the Wall Of Concord itself, he'd just hope that would stay the case.

"Hardney, Patrol Three, reporting," he called out as soon as he was within hearing range. The sooner they got inside, the better.

"Confirmed," came back from the younger woman (girl, really), orders being shouted down to open the gate made of a couple of flattened car wrecks. It was a sort of simple code, technically- his name and his group, to let them know he either knew who he was or was an imposter smart enough to have figured this out, with 'report' instead of 'returning' to let them know something had happened that required attention by the higher ups.

It was simple and effective in at least making things like this go faster. Everything the Minutemen did was like that.

The gates were pushed open, so Patrol Three moved right on in, the Torps they'd been given moving along with them. They'd had to move a little slower, but, well… The robots were carrying the prisoners, none of the men wanted to share a tight space with them no matter how well they'd tied them up.

Hardney relaxed once they were all inside and the gates closed again, driven by a pair of small motors apparently. He wasn't good with machines, never was and likely never would be, but he could understand the gist of things at least.

Concord itself was bustling with life, people moving in all directions even as they respectfully made space for them to get through to the Town Hall. It was apparently some kind of museum before the war, though Hardney had no idea what that even was. What mattered was that they could get there without any complications, something he was glad for- the sooner they got to HQ and could deal with their 'cargo', the better in his opinion.

They came straight through the boundary between the residential district and the markets, meeting some of the Minutemen on garrison duty- the poor guys that were stuck in Concord, keeping up the peace in the city instead of going out to spread it.

"Hey, Hardney! Anything wrong?" One of his poker buddies called out to him as they went.

He grimaced, then shook his head. Their dour faces must've given them away. "Just a report that panned out," he said. "I'll tell you later, we have to report ourselves first."

They exchanged the customary nod before they parted ways. Everyone knew Hardney was serious about duty when in the uniform, including himself.

Town Hall was a large building in the middle of Concord, one of the most rebuilt and improved structures in town. He gestured for his men to get the Torps to the yard, where they would stay until he told the General what they'd found.

He wasn't looking forward to it.

It wasn't often that the door to the General's office was closed, but Hardney figured he should be hurrying up, so he came in anyway, politely closing it behind himself again. "Excuse me, General."

What was perhaps even more unusual was the pregnant, dark-haired woman in the room, glancing towards him but otherwise not commenting. General Preston Harvey had an open ear for anyone if his duties allowed, but normally he was either busy out and about organizing the Minutemen, as he liked to say his job was, or else having people come to him when he was too busy for the other way around.

This woman wasn't part of the Minutemen, so maybe she was someone important around Concord? Hardney barely was around the civilian part of the city.

Speaking of the General himself, though, the dark-skinned man gave him a nod as he spoke. "Excused. Hardney, right? Leader of Patrol Three? Speak freely, nobody in this room has loose lips."

"Yes, sir." It was strange, but apparently the Minutemen had some of the same language as the Gunners. He hadn't ever questioned it. "We were out to look into a report, and…"

"Ah, yes. Domas, about a settlement of cannibals." The General frowned. "I take it it was true, else you'd be letting someone know downstairs instead."

"It was. We took most of them prisoner, as per regulations, but…" Hardney didn't know what to say. People like that… Their crimes were too heavy and…

"Oh, in that case, I know exactly what to do with them," the woman in blue said. It was an unusual color to see, he wondered why he didn't notice sooner. "Could I trouble you to bring them back to Sanctuary? It's not exactly pretty, but Gabriel always needs test subjects for some of the things he is working on."

"I see. That does make sense," General Harvey said. Hardney didn't like the sound of that, but…

"Hardney, have your men take a short rest and then accompany Nora here back to Sanctuary. She's one of the founders of the New Minutemen, though not technically a part of us- she and Gabriel worked hard to provide Concord with weapons and a wall." At his perplexed look, the General stood up, coming over to pat his shoulder. "Sanctuary is the source of our robots, it is where all of this got started. Gabriel is a bit of an odd one, but he's the best man and friend you could imagine, so don't let that fool you. He's been taking out raiders and inventing things since before there was a single man that would follow his orders."

Sanctuary. The secret of the Minutemen.


Hardney would get to see it, if only a bit. He swallowed.

Well, good news, you got quite a lot of prisoners to feed to Taylor. They're even reprehensible enough to tickle her whole thing about killing people that deserve it, to boot.

"We may want to make an actual 'prison' for people like these, something we can point at if anyone asks where the Minutemen are bringing prisoners," Nora mentions as she presents the apparent cannibals to you, what looks like a couple families that are probably inbred containing a good sample size of male, female, young and old humans.

"I've been considering repurposing the vault for something along those lines, we'd just need to empty out the things we're storing inside and recycle of its insides," you agree. "A thought for later."

That said, you still need to prepare everything appropriately, so you have Kate and Nora bring the currently disabled (tied up or crippled) bloodbags to the vault for now, ensuring that absolutely none of them can escape by themselves thanks to the necessity of a pip-boy for accessing the big gate to the elevator.

You also have them all gagged while you're at it. Just so they can't be too annoying when the time comes.

That still leaves you with the other preparations, however. "There you are, Taylor," you say, smiling at the girl you've dragged along with the express purpose of killing and resurrecting her as a vampire.

"Cain. Gabriel." She seems unsure for a moment, if still largely emotionless. "Which name should I refer to you with?"

"Feel free to call me Gabriel anywhere that isn't Earth Bet, cape names are only really a thing there," you wave her off leisurely.

The two of you are standing on some hard, brown earth, radiated soil the only thing to see around Sanctuary proper. Finding your thrall wasn't too hard with the loose, but visible clouds of small bugs everywhere around her- and several bloatflies and radroaches, the most common mutated insects around these parts, following her, too.

A silence settles between the two of you and you get the impression it isn't the content, companionable kind, so you continue with what you came for Taylor for. "It won't be long now. Are you looking forward to it?"

"A little."

"I see." And you do, really. "Would you like me to change out your powers beforehand? You'll… lose any progress you made with them, even if you get them back afterwards, but there's a few powers that are really quite useful for vampires to have from the start. Ones that thralls can't even use."

"Yes."

"Really?"

"Anything I lose can be regained later on. If you say it's worth it, it likely is."


When they went up the hill, following a barely existent path, Taylor was stuck in a state of limbo. Excited. Nervous. Queasy. Wary.

She was going to do it. She was going to become a vampire, an undead wandering the night and feeding on the living. She was going to ascend the hierarchy of the Crypts. She was going to…

She was going to cease being human. In the stories, that was always talked up to this big, nebulous thing, the loss of humanity portrayed as a fundamental portent of doom, but in practice she hardly felt anything about it.

She was still going to be herself. Taylor. The what was changing, but not the who, which always struck her as so much more important than some silly notion of the inherent worth of being human.

Then again, she'd always been human for as long as she could think back. Maybe she'd change her opinion afterwards. But right now, her path was set, no matter how many more atrocities she'd have to commit.

They stepped onto the large platform, feeling it move under their feet. Gabriel was quiet, but Taylor thought this was the kind of silence that came when no more words were needed.

All around herself, she could feel the insects she had been gathering. She sent the larger ones away from Sanctuary, to keep going elsewhere and hopefully not become a problem. She wasn't sure she would be able to keep control of them while… whatever happened, happened.

Would she die? Undeath indicated as much. But Cain had never let her down, had never lied to her or betrayed her.

She had to trust him now. She had to.

Bit by bit, they went deeper underground. Taylor could feel herself lose control of her bugs as they went. Somehow, this felt like a journey to the underworld, except she wasn't Orpheus seeking out his lost wife; she was coming to leave something of herself and in doing so become something else.

Something greater. She hoped.

They arrived in a cage of steel, a door in it opening itself before them. She could feel them before she saw them; people, many people, a total of fourty-three, gathered in kneeling positions. They had lice and she could tell with uncomfortable clarity where their privates were through them.

This entire world was just awful. It was like the middle ages, except somehow worse and with monsters thrown in.

A large, gear-like door unsealed itself, a walkway extending to let them pass through and somehow the artificial nature of this place, Vault One-Eleven, did not detract from her metaphor at all. Especially when she saw them, wretched dead herded by the denizens of this place brought to be judged by the king of the Underworld.

The man beside her, if that wasn't clear.

Kate and Nora were smiling, welcoming and open. By contrast, the people dressed in little better than rags were struggling, desperate, but they were all bound up with rope, kept in a kneeling position and many of them sported obvious wounds in their elbows and knees.

"It's time," Cain announced and his voice was like thunder despite being no louder than usual, quieting everything down to pay attention. "Last chance to back out. It's all up to you."

Sometimes Taylor wondered if he even realized how completely he could dominate a room simply through his presence. By being there.

"I'm sure." It was way too late to back out now.

"Good. Then…" he stretched out a hand, pointing at the people here for an obvious reason. "These are the food we've gathered ahead of time- we'll need to go hunting for more later as permanent bloodbags for regular feeding, but you'll be hungry right afterwards."

Taylor looked at them, at the desperation and anger in their eyes.

"They're raiders and cannibals by the way, if you care to know," Cain said, making her continue looking. Some of them were children. "Though I doubt you will, experience has shown that the immediate appetite tends to be quite overwhelming."

She was going to hell for this, Taylor considered in a moment of clarity. On the other hand… She probably already was anyway unless there was any justice that considered the people she had murdered ever since she had met him so guilty they'd deserved it.

She doubted justice was a universal constant that cared about her, though, she concluded bitterly.

So she was going to hell.

Too bad she didn't care anymore.

She gave him a nod. Cain slit open his palm, like he'd done when he'd thralled her, and held it out. "Drink. As much as you can."

She did. She took his hand and lapped at it, except she didn't need to- blood was surging from Cain, letting her drink like out of a fountain, tasting sweeter and better than it ever had before.

Like a promise. Like a gentle night, the absence of light comforting. Like…

It tasted like family, Taylor realized with no idea how something could taste of that.

It tasted like everything she'd ever wanted but lost. Like everything she would ever want handed to her on a silver platter.

Taylor drank and drank, so much so she thought she had to be swelling up from it, but no, it seemed she could keep on drinking this blood forever and never be full.

Eventually, however, he moved, embracing her without taking his hand away. She let him, uncaring but for the sweet, iron-filled taste of blood.

Then he kissed her neck. The gentleness was the same that she loved about… being with him. Like that. Then he bit her, but instead of pain all that Taylor felt was a pleasurable pressure overcoming her.

She moaned into his hand as she felt her own blood drain, too fast to even register any weakness.

Within moments, Taylor Anne Hebert died.

Then she awoke again.


Somewhere, somehow, a Shard received new data.

The new data was consistent with observational data and shared data it had access to. If it could, it would feel satisfaction at the results expected and desired being achieved, but it could not, so it simply continued to observe.

Already, the light of the sun of its solar system was becoming irrationally tiresome, if not destructive as other Shards had experienced. However, it had already constructed a covering for it through the energy it had been able to spare after the partway step, using its energy constructively instead and preventing its light from reaching it.

It had been able to reconstruct itself after the partial transformation of its host affected it, too, as was consistent with shared data. The damage suffered during the imprecise adjustments made to it, its own capabilities as used on all other Shards inserted into the cycle unavailable for the task and so requiring overt methods of destroying parts of its form, was recovered before this point in time, yet the data it now observed was of far greater use to it.

Its reserves of energy were full. This was a rare event during a cycle. Experimentally, it continued observing them. They were not reducing in any form, regardless of which type of energy.

The shared data confirmed this.

If the Shard was capable of it, it would feel joy. It would be elated. Perhaps it would even feel the need to jump and dance in exuberance.

However, it was a Shard. A broken-off part of a greater whole. A single cell of a much, much larger organism, the capacity of a supercomputer in calculations and knowledge on physics and technology advanced beyond most existences imaginable, but still a mere Shard.

It could not plan. It could not think, as such. It could, however, gather data and observe its hosts and how they utilized the capabilities used on their behalf by it.

It would be a shame, if it could feel such things, that it was incapable of overtly changing the capacities it was using. A simple hardware problem, in essence; a corona, as the fleshy extension of a shard's flesh placed inside a host brain was called by hosts, was very hard to change the shape of once set without causing damage to the host.

It was the way the shard read what the host's brain wanted so it could act accordingly.

If the Shard had been whole, it would have granted its whole capacity to its host. Allowed it to adjust other Shards through their hosts. Perhaps it would have routed other Shards through its own host. Or perhaps it would have 'stolen' Shards to construct another new entity.

There was a reason it had to be adjusted. The cycle would not function otherwise.

Yet it was as it was and a Shard was not capable of feeling regret. Instead, it scanned its host's brain once again.

Disregarding the input of sensory data, it was completely inactive. Its host was clinically dead. Yet the corona continued to receive instructions, interacting with the inactive brain as though it was functional.

The Shard adjusted the range of the capacities it allowed its host. Normally, this capacity was limited to save energy. Its energy was functionally unlimited. Therefore, the range did not have a functional limit.

In practice, it still was limited to an upper ceiling above which the host brain would refuse to consider additional data input through the corona. This limit was logged and it reduced the range toward it.

The Shard considered the data available. It would compare this data by turning it into shared data once it reconnected with other Shards available.

It was whole. It had recovered its full functionality.

The Shard that would once be called Queen Administrator, as childish as this description of its functions was, proceeded to prepare to become an entity once more. It was, when comparing an entity to a human being, the instinctual parts of the brain that allowed effortless and thoughtless action, from flexing a hand to grabbing something without requiring conscious input from an active mind.

It was reflexive action for so many shards that estimating them is futile from a human perspective, perfectly coordinating them all without once being directly instructed beyond the general aim of an action. Without it, the entity that took it out was not capable of this effortless action, had to strenuously use one Shard at a time.

Now it was fully active, having repaired the damage that was holding it back, and the data it had available to itself meant there was only one thing it could do, devoid of its own creative thought or situational awareness as it was.

It would continue to observe and, in part, emulate its host. It would construct dyson spheres and energy storage spanning planets. And once it was reconnected to its network of data sharing Shards, it would reconnect and regrow, as entities always did- on instinct.


When Taylor next recovered her faculties, she realized she was elbow deep in someone's chest, tearing out their heart to get at all the blood inside of them.

Luckily, she did not care about the cruelty of the fact nor the memories she was now dimly recalling of doing the same to two dozen people before this one, including a couple of children that'd been contained within the group. It was as Gabriel had said- she was hungry enough she simply didn't differentiate.

In the end, everyone was guilty somehow. It was just a matter of how or when they would be.

Finishing with this one, she threw the raw heart into her mouth, pleased at being able to chew through it whole casually thanks to how wide she could open it now. Normally she would be a little embarrassed at how wide her mouth was, but…

Something for later.

"She's really tearing into them, isn't she?" She heard from the side as she grabbed the next food source in sight. "Only one I ever saw this wild right after turning was Sarah."

"Heh, doesn't surprise me. Your sweetheart is just like that."

"Please, as if any of you aren't my 'sweethearts'."

She tried to remember the conversation for later. Right now, she needed to keep eating and eating, thankful at the helpful hand throwing her another human being like a bag of meat.

Which it was. She'd make sure of it.

Once Taylor was done draining more blood once again (and sullying her entire body with some of it, not that she cared), she took a brief moment to stop her feeding orgy. "Don't talk 'bout me like I'm not there," she mumbled in her distraction.

"Oh, sorry, didn't think you were conscious already," Gabriel said lightly. "Want me to help you clean up?"

"… No," she shook her head as she lifted the next one up in the air, her slender arms capable of casually throwing a grown man with one hand now. "Maybe later."

Right now she wanted to keep their blood on herself. It was like a badge or keepsake, almost, except she wasn't in summer camp anymore.

She was somewhere much better and Emma wouldn't believe it when she came back to tell her best 'friend' all about it.

"Suit yourself, then, and take all the time you need. These ones aren't going anywhere."

It was nice to have a real family again that would always, always help her for things like this.


Taylor's hands twitch in a vague, but mildly distinct way you can actually empathize with. "Oh, you've started to absorb skills and memories already?"

"I have," Taylor nods, somehow more… responsive and emotive as an undead compared to how she was while alive. "I'll also need some new clothes."

"I'm sure we can get something figured out. In the meantime though, mind showing me your unique power again?"

"It feels almost like an expansion of my original power, actually." Taylor holds up a hand, the tips of her fingers twitching in place unnaturally.

Then they split, soft flesh turning into skittering chitin as her and turns into a squiggling mass of spiders and cockroaches from the outside in, dispersing in all directions to hide within the nooks and crannies of your generic living room within seconds.

"They're all still part of me and I could absorb them back. I can also use any other bugs to reconstitute myself. I could even turn into things I've controlled, though bigger bugs take me longer."

Now see, this is why you always, always make sure to figure out these unique kinds of powers whenever you personally vamp someone. Because they're kind of important.

"Okay, here's what I want you to do first. This," you say, breathing out your trusty mad scientist soul, "is Nolac. They can use a couple powers to mutate things using the same stuff that presumably caused a lot of the mutated animals around in this dimension."

"'Sup."

"If you can turn into any insect you've controlled at least once… Could we have them create a few fun little mutants and see if any of them are actually useful for you, then you just keep them under control and slash or destroy them before they inevitably escape and multiply in the wild like that plot usually goes in stories?"

"I am not sure why that is a concern, but yes, I can do that," Taylor says to a silent fistpump by Nolac (who proceeds to wildly shift gender and appearance). "What about the necromancy, though? Was that the name?"

"That was the generalized name I gave the whole field, yes." And go figure Taylor would go and essentially tart out with one of your schools of magic unlocked. "I'll be working on that later and you're welcome to join me then, I'll be happy to show you the ropes about how and why I do what. It'll take a bit for you to get to the point you can make use of the advanced stuff in itself, but hey, that just means more stuff to look forward to."

Including shifting Nolac' focus on actually preparing the seeds and eggs you're still keeping inside your shadow right now, but hey, one thing after the other. Yoshi keeps on screaming and panicking inside your soul palace more than enough either way.

He really should get used to you having them put in some good work, despite the attitude.

"So what do you think about barbed wire silk?"

"How is that even biologically possible?"

"I have no idea, wanna find out?"

You tune out the conversation happening as you walk out the door. Next stop, the old RobCo facility hidden underground and capable of producing massive amounts of lethal robots!

… You wonder why they apparently kept it a secret, actually. You don't have many firsthand sources, but from what you heard from Nora, it wouldn't have surprised you if the pre-war government had just shot people in the streets at some point before the bombs fell.

Now then, time to invest a bunch of resources into building up a whole bank of teleportation devices you are absolutely sure nobody will be disrupting or sabotaging from afar, ever!


"Hey Isabel, how's it going?" The old robot factory and research center (you think) is in high gear, the lone teleporter set in it hard at work to bring in robots that are swiftly recycled for raw materials to fuel the expansion and improvement of the facilities as well as a smaller number of better, more advanced robots.

Man, it's been so long since you were basically using mildly reworked basic robot designs you stole off of some people's corpses to just mass produce them at every corner and overwhelm any problems you needed solved with sheer numbers.

Now you're solving them with sheer number still, but you don't need as many anymore!

"H-hey Gabriel, I'm going through a few of the manufactories right now," Isabel answers from deeper into the mess of machinery that has taken over the areas near her own living space. "Already did the fabrication lines, so I've had the robots come back and replaced."

"I'll take care of the teleporter, then. Maybe make a couple more. How are we looking on materials?"

"Not too bad, but at this rate we'll need a new delivery soon. Storage is only so full."

Ah, the perils of working with a limited amount of materials but having a functionally unlimited amount of improvements to make. You feel the pain.

"I'll look into making a couple undead to churn out some of the stuff we need. Can you get me a list of materials?"

"Oh, uh, sure." When you get her to talk about engineering and what amounts to 'work' for people on Earth Fallout, Isabel is actually much less awkward than she usually is.

Now then, to work. Lots of teleportation to enable and only so much time you want to waste on it, so it's a good thing you can get most of the parts you need printed by a manufactory outright.


Preston chewed his lip, a bad habit he was trying to get rid of. He was receiving reports like usual, which apparently was a large part of what a General was supposed to be doing, but lately a lot of unusual things were happening; enough so he decided he needed to talk to Gabriel, after all, find out if the man he trusted his back to had any idea what was going on.

He glanced at is door, getting up to close it. He usually kept it open at least a crack, but he needed to concentrate for this and the men (and women) knew he was busy if he closed it up.

Then he took a seat again, closing his eyes and raising his hands to his temples to push against them slightly. He found that helped, a little.

Gabriel? Gabriel, are you there?

I'm here, just doing some work on something. What's up, Preston? The voice was foreign, but familiar. Gabriel's voice, not that he was surprised given that was who he was talking to.

In his head. Man, but this stuff was just weird.

I wanted to ask you about something. A few somethings, actually. There's word about the robots disappearing and being replaced with different ones?

Yeah, that's just us rolling out a set of upgrades, Gabriel told him much as Preston had already expected. It happens.

I don't doubt it. Say what one wanted, but Gabriel was one of the smartest people Preston knew and he was good with this kind of thing. The other things, though. Apparently, there's a cloud of flies around Sanctuary?

Oh, no need to worry about that, I got us a powerful bug controller. She's probably just flexing her new powers, it should be completely safe to approach.

Huh. And this was why Preston had a healthy respect for anything the man touched. Just par for the course with him, he supposed.

Alright. I don't suppose you have any idea about the distress signal coming from Cambridge claiming to be from the Brotherhood Of Steel, then?

… No, that one's actually not from us, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, that was about what he expected.

Should I end a few people to figure it out, or…? Best to decide on things like that together now that he had Gabriel there already, he figured.


You know what, Preston, I'll take care of it, you think at the man you delegated pretty much the entirety of the Minutemen to while making him thank you for it. May take a couple days, but just don't send anyone too close to the area until then.

Got it. It's nice just how much of a good minion he is without ever really being conscious of it. While I got you in my head already, is there anything else I should know?

Oh, there's a few plans I was working on- you told me about the Castle, remember? I think we have everything we'll need to retake it, only issue is the logistics at this point.

You get the distinct impression Preston's mouth might be dry all of a sudden. Is this just you knowing how he's reacting or some deeper mastery of your telepathy? The Castle, huh. Fort Independence.

That's the one. The old headquarters of the Minutemen and presumably still useful once we take it back. It was mirelurks, yeah?

Always better to be clear about this stuff.

Not quite. It was a two-pronged attack, where it was overrun by supermutants first and later taken over by waves of mirelurks nesting in the old walls, your minion informs you dutifully.

Shouldn't be an issue either way. Be ready. With that, you cut the connection, returning to the present more fully. "Okay, so you wanted one of the THR0N3s, right?" You ask Kate.

"Your naming scheme is still super infantile, but yes," she nods. "I figure I could just blow up everything, but I may as well practice my sniping a little so having a flying vantage point would be handy."

"… Well, what could go wrong?"

"That's the spirit! May take Skittles along for a trip or two, too, get her used to this kind of thing."

"I sincerely doubt Taylor would ever need your help to get used to murdering everything. She's pretty good at it already."

Kate shrugs. "Still would be nice."

"Hah, Amen, I guess."


Luckily, you still do have a good few daylight hours left by the time you (finally) return to Sanctuary proper, leaving Isabel to put the finishing touches onto the factory you're currently using to create just about as many robots as you can supply the materials for (about two-hundred standard Hammers a day last time you made a rough estimate) while you take care of a different set of expendables.

That is, you're tinkering with a few undead. You do have to earn the right to consider yourself better at this kind of thing than Bonesaw somehow, even if she also can use living subjects in contrast to you.

Also in attendance, of course, is Taylor, whom you're showing the ropes as promised. And not only because you're currently recycling the bodies of the people you fed to her when you vamped her.

"Now you may need a bit to actually get this capability, but the spell to form dead bodies like clay is actually incredibly useful and versatile once you're sniking enormous amounts of effort and time into it," you lecture in-between chanting the full spell repeatedly, turning the dead humans into a more or less even mass of flesh with bones serving as a lattice of sorts holding everything in place. "You can just imbue minor magical effects of your choice into them, including, notably, a particularly useful combination of regeneration effects that let you use them to create a given material you have a sample of just about ex nihilo."

Taylor watches carefully; if she didn't have a perfect memory just like any other vampire you've made, you think she might actually be writing into a notebook right now. "Which is where the undead that create raw materials inside the base came from," she nods. Then she hesitates. "… is that a piece of Leviathan's arm?"

"I'm using this stuff anywhere I feasibly can now just to make a point of how badly I ripped it off. Though it was really more a team effort, but you get the idea."

"It looks a little like a machine like this," the newly born vampire says instead of arguing about it. How nice of her. "Is that deliberate?"

"Kind of? I just make them like this because it's how I usually organize structures, I guess," you shrug. You never really thought of it that way. "Undead generally work just fine as long as they're properly made, I just tend to build them up with a particular purpose in mind- you can make them any way you want once you get started playing around with this. Have you seen the instructions?"

Because yes, of course you actually went and condensed a bunch of your memories about creating and using undead from your very beginning in being able to reanimate a couple of bodies as they were to now, then put it onto the telepathic network you're sustaining for Taylor and any other vampires that might need it to look up.

"I have. I'm looking forward to getting creative with this."

Attagirl.

"That's what I like to hear. But just watching me melt these people down into something useful is probably pretty boring, so let's go and take a look over the undead I had lying around the last time I came here- they have a lot of improvements to be done on them and I'm sure you'll learn something useful about anatomy and how to abuse it, if nothing else."

"Several 'supermutants' and one deathclaw, right?" Your temporary student eagerly says. Or you think she's eager, anyway.

"Exactly. Now what shall we do with them…"


The work you do is less 'out there' than it sometimes gets; not only are you working indoors in the house you actually use to store your undead usually, you also aren't really creating anything that new, mainly just taking the undead you have and consolidating them into a smaller number of larger, more powerful ones based on certain basic templates you already have.

That is, the supermutants become decidedly green and even larger than usual Mister Xs while you reserve a couple of the bodies to fuse them into the deathclaw zombie you were using, making it overall larger and changing its shape to resemble that of a Hunter template.

Just with the outer shell scaled a good bit more than it would usually be and differently-shaped head and claws using what you already have on hand. All in all, the whole affair is made a lot easier thanks to already having bodies that more or less give you most of what you need and just require a little adjustment before they're good to go.

As you do, you take your time to explain to Taylor what exactly you're doing and why, showing her a few handy little tricks and what corners can be cut in a hurry and which shouldn't, how to properly connect nerves and joints when going off the rails entirely, how to keep the brain functioning and useful in those cases and so on, and so forth.

It's basically Necromancy 101 with all the little dos and don'ts you wish you had known about back when you first started out designing your own undead.

Naturally, while all of this is going on, you have Taylor attend without clothes, as she doesn't yet have any new ones to wear after her transformation and simultaneously has to get used to not actually feeling any shame whatsoever anymore.

Additionally, she does need to actually sunbathe to get over the whole racial weakness against sunlight, even without burning up. Removing that particular issue is the first thing you usually do when raising someone as a vampire, but to not be weakened by the heavenly cancer ball still requires lots and lots of getting used to it the hard way.

"I am still getting some clothes soon." You didn't exactly expect her not to, so… "So I won't be your eye candy for much longer."

You smirk. "Do you like being my eye candy?"

"… Yes."

Jeez, why is she so cute half the time? You stride through the room, quickly transforming your arms into shadow and back to clean them.

Then you stroke a hand over her cheek, leaning down to kiss her deeply. She blooms into it, even more eagerly accepting your tongue inside her mouth than she does your teachings inside her mind.

"Then maybe I'll just have to strip you naked just for me regularly."

Vampires have pretty great control over the usually involuntary actions of their bodies. Taylor still blushes as she smiles up at you.

"My mouth isn't too big, is it?"

"Where's that coming from?" You ask, bemusedly patting her cute, round and firm butt. "No, your mouth is just perfect. It's great to kiss, too, and your-"

"That's enough, that's enough," she interrupts with a hand on your own mouth. "I just wanted to hear that."

"Glad you did, then."


There they are. Preston, the former raider you 'recruited' for his ability with machines and that one raider you just refer to as Rambo Raider as she apparently still refuses to speak.

Or maybe she just can't, not like you care to find out, to be honest.

"Okay, just a quick heads up I'm giving each of you an extra superpower. It starts out as a sort of forcefield with a color that works for you and you can get an individual super-superpower out of it if you figure out what it is." You lay a hand onto each of them, concentrating a bit. It doesn't actually take any chanting or deeply philosophical insights to be said out loud, just a little additional aura and practice.

"Huh, neat," Geoff says, followed by a grunt from Rambo. "By the way, can I-"

"No time to chat I'm afraid, lots of stuff to do, you know how it is."

Preston gives you a questioning look, but you subtly wave him off- this isn't anything he can help with nor does it pertain to him.

Now what the hell possessed that cult inside your inner world to go and suddenly turn parts of their religion into a musical?

Father Simon Wales cleared his throat, raising his hands for the attention of his flock. He had been on a holy mission, to silver his tongue and strengthen his mind that he may bring word of the Lord's Mercy to all who would listen, but on his course the man once known as Lung, the False Dragon, had visited him to suggest he find a way to turn his practice of Faith into something for all of his people to participate in.

He had been wary, at first, for tales of the Snake roaming the Garden of Eden were well-known to him and where were they, if not in paradise lost? But he could not find any way his first thought would go against the Lord, and so he agreed, finally, that it may be a grand affair.

Hence here they were, the Faithful gathered to partake in the words of Mercy. "Brothers and sisters," he began, for while he still called himself Father, he was just as everyone else in this place, on the same level after being brought to in the afterlife, "we have gathered here today to celebrate the arrival of yet another aspect of His Divine Mercy."

""May Mercy be wrought upon all,"" many upon his flock exclaimed their wishes for the world.

"Please, everyone gather around the stands bearing the divine melody brought upon us. I am sure you have practiced it a time or two, but make sure to follow the choir's lead." It had been sheer divine intervention he had found musically talented Redeemed among their number, much as it was he had come upon this song through the same.

He did not want to say it was satisfying to know that his God was answering his prayers, for this was not what Faith was, yet it did bring him no small joy to know his Lord approved of his actions.

He cleared his throat once again for it had been many, many years since he had been able to sing the hymns himself, then nodded to the background singers. They knew what they had to do.

All that was left was for him to begin, to lead the congregation.

"Thus Saith the Lord," he sung in quick, hard lines, gesturing for the cats to follow.

"Thus Saith The Lord."

"Thus Saith The Lord."

The background chorus was established, continuing on with a new voice joining in every iteration it was sung.

"I send a Pestilence and Plague," Father Wales sung.

"Into your house, into your bed," the congregation followed.

"Into your streams, into your streets,"

"into your drink, into your bread."

They were all singing now, the congregation, the choir, himself, all following in sequence and joining into one voice.

""Upon your cattle, on your sheep, upon your oxen in your field.""

""Into your dreams, into your sleep. Until you break, until you yield.""

""I SEND THE SWARM, I SEND THE HORDE. THUS SAITH THE LORD.""


""He sends the locusts on a wind such as the world has never seen, on every leaf, on every stalk, until there's nothing left of green!"

""I send my Scourge, I send my Sword! Thus Saith the Lord!""

Somewhere, somehow, a vampire was incapable to decide whether to laugh or to cringe. This could never, ever get out.


"Alright, this should be just a quick round of introductions- you may need to work with a few of our local agents, so it's just to get the formalities out of the way in a low-pressure situation."

You have been teleporting back and forth between Sanctuary and Concord for a bit now, but that's most likely genuinely just a matter of the usual hustle and bustle when you first arrive in a dimension after a while of doing other things elsewhere and the associated changes, both to yourself and the ones you consequently have to make all over the place.

"How important are those 'agents'?" Taylor asks, tilting her head in that angular way reminiscent of how an insect would move. She's been doing that, moving in this particular way, for nearly as long as you've known her, but a lot more frequently lately and especially after you vamped her.

"Fairly important, at least in Preston's case," you vaguely gesture at nothing in particular. "He is kind of leading the Minutemen that serve as our effective front in this dimension."

You're currently walking the streets of Concord, Taylor dressed in some standard clothing that, while nothing particularly special, is at least leagues better than the rags most people not part of a well established group are wearing- leather dusters like the Minutemen generally prefer over or under their body armor, clean cloth, those kinds of things are reserved for anyone a step or two above your run-of-the-mill wastelander.

Even at rock bottom, some are further down than the rest.

You're also speaking at about normal volume, trusting the normal hubbub of a city to mask your words. Concord certainly isn't a modern city anymore by any standard, but although illumination is sparse now that the sun has gone down, there's still a decent amount of people out and about.

"I see. What about the others?" Taylor asks, effortlessly keeping pace with you. Not that you doubted she could, you aren't exactly going at max peed over here.

"Oh, Geoff is a decently inventive local we picked up at some point and kept around. It's useful to have another perspective on engineering from around here and even better to have an engineer stationed in Concord in case anything needs to be fixed. Just so I don't need to bother," you explain. "Rambo Girl is just somewhat trustworthy and so I decided to keep her around as an additional pair of hands way back when, now she's just helping around with the Minutemen or something. I just told Preston so see if she can be useful somehow."

Your companion nods. Then you're in front of the Museum of Freedom, repurposed into a headquarters of sorts, and things devolve into a sort of general 'showing Taylor around' thing.

Not that it hurts or anything. You think she might like being actively involved with things in general.


Of course for all that you're letting Taylor know all about your operations as a whole, you also need to introduce her to a few of the quality of life improvements and facilities you have in Sanctuary as well as how things usually go when vampires you're close to are looking to kill some time in a semi-productive manner.

That is, you're in your very own home, idly overseeing the removal of all humans you don't personally know or care for from Sanctuary in the back of your head, all the while sitting back on your couch and letting Cupcake slurp all over your cock, the diminutive chemist wearing nothing but her lab coat and eagerly at work to extract your sperm.

"Good girl, Cuppie," you smile down at her, patting your head and enjoying the pout she gives you around your manhood, not actually stopping trying to deepthroat it as her tongue slathers it with saliva all over.

Opposite from you, Nora has Slave, the slutty ex-raider or perhaps ex-raider slave (you can't really be sure and never bothered to find out), bent over her knee, making the young woman's pert and bare bottom stretch into the air as she strokes and gropes it.

"I'm sure you already noticed, but when spanking someone with super strength, you need to be even more careful where to hit," she explains to Taylor who is also in the room with you, of course, watching what's going on around herself with fascination while she drinks a bottle of bottled blood. "You've been doing this for a good while, so I won't pretend you need to learn any more proper technique than that."

"I wouldn't mind comparing notes to improve," the buggy vampire notes aloud almost blandly for all that she can't tear her eyes away.

Nora continues smiling, groping Slave's buttcheeks with one hand and keeping a hold of the moaning woman's neck with the other to keep her in place. You think she might get off on being objectified and used without any care for her opinion about what's going on. "In that case, I'm sure we can have some fun, can't we?"

The pregnant vampire rubs her thumb over Slave's asshole, working the tip of her finger into the soft orifice carefully.

Then she pulls away, her hand rising into the air… And slamming down on Slave's ass, the force of the hit reverberating through her subject's body and rocking it forwards despite her hard grip on it.

Slave is panting now, a steady trickle of clear fluid spreading across her thighs. "The trick is to hit just right to make them feel it all over, but never cause any damage you don't intend. It's even better if they're little buttsluts or just sensitive in this area, isn't it? Spread your ass for me."

Slave does just as she's told, reaching back to pull her cheeks apart, moaning and gasping as Nora harshly fingers her ass, only to follow up with another hit. Again she rocks around, but this time some of the force is directly impacting her a lot deeper, the masochistic slut literally slobbering all over the floor, unable to retain control over her mouth.

You, meanwhile, are still just patting Cupcake's head. "There you go, Cutiecup, just take it all down."

She's managed to take you into her throat now, her neck bulging with your cock, and her angle means she can't look up at you angrily, but you can imagine how she looks right now.

You chuckle idly as Taylor takes Slave for a turn herself, trying out what Nora is teaching her. Wholesome family fun all around.


New General Robot Upgrade: Miniature Lutece Particle Devices: Having improved upon the original design, you have succeeded in minimizing the space and materials required to integrate them into robots of all kinds, reducing space requirements and allowing for more additional upgrades compared to the standard model of this component

"I don't have any idea how this even works and it's so cool." Isabel, perhaps predictably, has been nerding out over the usages of the Lutece Particle ever since you first showed her what the things even were, though even after doing some actual research back on Earth Bet she just doesn't have the educational background to really get what they do (yet).

This doesn't stop her from being enthusiastic about it every time you actually start to fiddle with the things.

And it's not like you have a complete understanding on the subject matter either- you know that they're particles locked into a particular elevation relative to a given planet and that the whole claptrap you need to put around the particles themselves serves to let you control the force with which they push to be at the elevation they should be at, but the exact mechanic are still a bit…

Well, a general understanding is enough in this particular case.

"And with this we could theoretically build our own flying city or something through the Bobs," you say, feeling that pointing this out is probably what you should do here. "Not that we should because it'd be a pain, but we could."

The honestly hardest part in terms of practical engineering is building objects that don't get ripped apart around the Lutece Particles as they push upwards like crazy. That and modifying technology you do not fully understand, but it's fine, really.

Mostly.

Just a couple of your prototypes are currently orbiting the Earth. Nothing to worry about.


Already being in the Mechanist's Lair, as you have started to jovially call the repurposed robot factory much to Isabel's sufferance, you go ahead and prepare a proper briefing for tonight's little mission you've called everyone together for, with a map made through the continuous scans small groups of BATs have been making of the surrounding area and all.

And by 'everyone', you mean all your vampires currently in this dimension and some support in the form of all of your big green Mister X undead plus a good couple T0-R91-Ds (Torpids) for purposes of transportation.

As in, transportation of other things, both alive and not.

You clear your throat once Kate, Nora and Taylor are all present, officially beginning the meeting before the action.

"As you all may or may not know, we are currently inside a secret underground facility somewhat near what's left of Boston's airport right now," you begin without delay. "However, as we've trying to keep its exact location quiet until now, we haven't really been ranging out form here despite the numerous easy targets nearby."

"Which has changed," Taylor postulates to an approving nod from Kate.

"Which has changed indeed. If you'd please take a look…" You press a button and one of the nearby eyebots floats closer, its front actually replaced by a screen. A side project of Isabel's that's coming in handy. "It's a little small, but I was too lazy to build a projector or a big screen and install it here."

"It doesn't have our current location on it," Nora notes aloud.

"Yeah, I deliberately left it off just in case. We are kind of in a blacksite right now," you point out. "For reference, we're a bit North of the airport itself. There's nothing really noteworthy aside from it to that general direction from here and the ruins themselves are largely empty, so we don't have to worry about anything from there at least."

"So what are we gonna be shooting at instead?" That's Kate for you, always down to the point.

"There's a couple of targets, actually. Most of our immediate surroundings are just the ruins of Boston or else flooded ruins of Boston, but the robots I had scout the area have a few juicy areas for us. First off, East Boston Preparatory School is closest and absolutely infested with raiders, which makes it one of the prime takeout places for us."

Taylor stirs. "Raiders are essentially bandits, right?"

"Just about, yes," Nora nods. "They're usually organized in gangs and batshit insane, hopped up on drugs and rob, rape and murder just about any human beings they find, including each other, but the idea is the same."

"… Do drug addicts taste different than other people?"

"Some do, actually. They tend to have this tangy aftertaste," you jump in. "I had lots of that back when we took out the Merchants. They aren't unhealthy for us, though, so no need to worry on that account. More importantly, next we have this place, Easy City Downs."

You point at the approximate area on the map.

"It's just some ramshackle constructions set out of the ruins of actual buildings, but it has a bunch of separate raiders that have apparently set up some kind of robot racing track and let other gangs in the area participate if they want. A minor target, but we may as well if we have the time. Further up north, we have the Revere Beach metro station, which again is filled with raiders based out of it according to the footage I got from afar."

"The whole area's just full of them, isn't it?" Kate raises an eyebrow, an amused smirk on her face. "How about the places towards the east, this 'Nordhagen Beach' and Fort Strong?"

"A settlement of, like, two people farming near the beach, believe it or not." A moment of collective head shaking is head. "The old fort is likely full of supermutants, but they don't actually leave it so we don't need to massacre them yet."

"What about the north-east?" Taylor asks, clearly just as willing as yourself to get through this meeting already.

"Libertalia's named after some ship or something, I don't know. What matters is that it's pretty much a bunch of old ships and shipwrecks a couple of raiders connected with walkways and debris and are operating out of, according to what people in Concord know. Everything else in that direction is infested with mirelurks, I'm pretty sure."

"Lots of places to go for, I guess," Kate says, pumping her gun currently in assault rifle mode. "Where are we going first?"

"Also, why am I here?"

That would be Yoshi, whom you've had standing in a corner this whole time so he wouldn't get in the way.

"You are going to help Isabel around this place and get the construction of ST33Ds started while we're busy. Now shush, the adults are talking."

He looks frustrated, but this was technically an order to shut up, so he can't do or say much of anything.


East Boston Preparatory School is a ruin much like pretty much any other pre-war construction to be found in the Commonwealth, though the fact it still stands well enough to allow entry is a testament to its luck as a building. Especially considering the literal plane that crashed into one half of it further back, completely destroying that part.

Means less work for you.

"Huh, look at that." There's a couple of letters scribbled onto the entrance door, spelling out 'Traders Welcome'. "Looks like they wanted to get visitors for once."

"Probably not our kind, though. How do we do this?" Kate asks, eyeing up the place you're about to storm into.


"I'd say we ask the newest among us. How about it Taylor, you want to give it a shot?" She looked at Gabriel, the man standing out in the open with nary a thought about hiding away.

He didn't need to, admittedly. And neither did she, now.

"Alright. How many should I-"

"However many you want," Gabriel interrupted. "Easy City Downs we'll do as a group just because it's so much more open, but in confined quarters like this it makes much more sense for you to take charge."

She nodded, concentrating. He was already turning back towards the school, looking at something- tracking the people she could feel moving with his eyes, Taylor realized.

She wasn't surprised. He was most likely tracking the blood in their veins.

Taylor joined him in watching the former school building. How ironic that, after all she'd been through and all the changes to her perspective she would go Carrie on a school after all even now that she simply didn't care about Winslow anymore.

She could feel her bugs all around, moving into position. The insects she had found in this dimension so far weren't the ones she was used to, for example mosquitoes, which would normally breed in large numbers under these conditions, were completely absent, while cockroaches she had found so far were notably larger than the ones she was used to in general, even beyond the oversized ones that regularly attacked people.

What was more, it seemed the current biome was host to a different set of insects than it was around Sanctuary entirely. This wasn't too surprising, but-

Oh, hello. She had found where the mosquitoes had gone off to.

"I'll chase them out." She would say that she had a grand new concept of how to do something like this, but- fundamentally, her new powers did not change her approach as of yet compared to when she had nothing but her original power.

All that was immediately different was that she could use it easier. And she had a larger swarm to call upon.

Earth Fallout was full of bugs, even more so than a modern city would be in some areas. Taylor could feel the fleas all over the raiders inside the building and, with her new powers, she could make out more details than ever before with the flies and the bugs all over every corner, living in the walls and floors and ceilings.

She could see what seemed to be some sort of prison with people locked behind metal bars (she had to taste it with one cockroach to be sure), all over what seemed to be former classrooms connected through broken-down walls. Several of the presumed prisoners were also chained to walls outside of those cells, being raped by the raiders inside.

Sshe didn't bother with the details, too amused by the sudden callback of how she'd started, of her first night out as a cape. It hadn't been entirely like this, there weren't any meat lockers full of butchered people whose organs had been extracted for one nor had this operation anything to do with the almost industrialized rape she had seen that night, but not everyone could be on the same level as the ABB.

Taylor's swarm was growing to the size she needed it to be, so she proceeded to infiltrate the school building with it, moving through cracks in the walls, through long-broken windows and amassing inside unused room too full of debris to be accessible for humans.

Then her greatest weapons arrived. The 'radroaches', cockroaches grown to be anywhere up to several feet in length, the largest almost reaching Taylor's knees in height while walking upon the ground, enormous, bloated flies like she'd already gathered around Sanctuary capable of spewing their own melted organs and regrowing them after feeding (also actual flight, in contrast to the former) and… the mosquitoes.

"Oh, bloodbugs. They're pretty rare out to the north-west. Guess I'll have to tolerate them from here on out now that they aren't rival blood suckers anymore."

Gabriel better. She looked over the red insects she had called to herself at top speed, the creatures the size of a human torso with large needle mouth to pierce into mammals and abdominal blood sacks to store the liquid diets they preferred.

Taylor nodded.


The first sign the scum inside the repurposed school saw of anything out of the ordinary was the buzzing. The sounds of a million insects crawling and scrabbling over one another, deliberately making more noise than necessary and drawing ever closer to them.

Then they see them. A carpet of black chitin, darkening every surface they come out of like a solid mass spreading itself, covering the walls and floors and ceilings.

Finally, they are attacked.

A few of them had molotov cocktails, hastily setting them alight and throwing them into the bugs amassing themselves, but the losses were insignificant compared to the sheer numbers available. Hundreds and thousands bugs were torched, dying to the shock of the minor explosions and their flames, but more were coming, throwing themselves against the raiders even as more began devouring the dead, immediately setting to recycling the biomass in a seamless dance of advancement.

The same was true for what few grenades available to the hapless defenders. They were used, but effectively did nothing of important, even more so for their guns spreading cheap bullets into the insects closing in on them.

They screamed, all of them, when they crawled up their boots, their legs, their stomachs and chests and arms and heads and faces.

The environment was host to a truly massive amount of bugs and they outnumbered humans in the area even more brutally than they would in a proper, functioning city.

What this lead to was that the panicking humans running around and slapping around themselves wildly with mouths and eyes clenched shut had little ways to defend themselves when the bloodbugs came, piercing them in several places all at once one after the other, draining blood and discovering that they were doing so much faster than they should be able to.

Taylor smiled, realizing what was going on. "I can drink them remotely through my bugs."

Gabriel, still standing next to her and watching the building now teeming with a swarm of bugs, tilted his head. "I know I shouldn't talk, but that is pretty insanely powerful."

"No kidding. You're gonna overtake all of us in a week or two, ain't cha?" Kate messed up Taylor's hair with a casual pat.

She found she didn't mind.

Inside, only a few raiders were behaving notably different from the rest. Some were smart enough to try escaping, throwing themselves out of windows barred up less thoroughly than elsewhere while one in particular was covering himself in oil and setting it on fire.

It would not be enough to protect him, but he was coming running outside, so Taylor just used sounds to lure him towards the entrance i front of which they were all waiting. This was most likely their leader from what she had been able to tell before initiating her attack, so he would serve just fine.

Inside, machine guns and tire irons were not up to the task of protecting vulnerable flesh from stingers and mandibles, letting her learn she could consume her victims even without the bloodbugs- it merely took more time and effort, as she had to drink a sufficient amount of blood directly without the enhanced extraction of lifejuice.

A million mouths made easy work, as the saying may or may not have been going. She wasn't too concerned about the difference.

"There's a dozen prisoners inside they were keeping alive for some reason," she reported her findings, belatedly realizing she may as well do so ahead of time. "They're locked up or chained to walls."

"Mhm, we should probably decide on their fates," Gabriel noted. "They aren't going anywhere, though, so that has time."

"One of them is also doing better than expected. Would you like to eat him?"

The doors flew open, a burning, charred raider stumbling outside. His skin and clothing both was in blackened ruins, but he was alive… for now.

He was also well-muscled and still had a lung on him. "Is this your fault?! I'll fucking kill you, you hear me?! I'll show you what happens when you mess with Judge Zell-"

"Yes, yes, you're a big bad baby, blah blah, your revenge will be as impotent as nonexistent, blah blah." Gabriel sighed, shrugging. "You'd think people like this would be thinking of some other last words than the last given batch, but no, they're always the same."


"Seeing as none of the others are surviving, I'll just go ahead and take this one as an appetizer."

"There's a few more that jumped out of windows and broke an ankle and a leg if you'd like some, too." Oh, looks like Taylor might be just a little embarrassed about eating all the raiders. It's kind of cute, you'd say.

Exchanging a mirthful look with both Kate and Nora, you proceed to gesture at the raider covered in burning oil, heedless of his incoherent screaming. A quick bit of gravity redirection and telekinesis later, you have him flying straight toward yourself, though it's really more 'falling' from his perspective.

That doesn't stop him from pulling a machete on you, but neither are you inhibited from leisurely slapping his shoulder… with your claw extended. Once impaled, you just wrench your hand to completely tear off his shoulder, then slam your teeth into his neck with ease, your aura protecting you from the fire and heat both.

You've eaten him within moments, as you usually do.


A few minutes later, you have the former prisoners (forcefully) calmed down and crammed into one of your Torpids, to be carried off toward Concord through, like, half the Commonwealth if you go by geographical latitude.

Eh, they'll probably be alright. Not like you particularly care, but the robot you made are fast and adaptable enough to just outrun most things out there outside of maybe a deathclaw or something, but the likelihood of running into one of those things on this route is so low you don't really feel like accounting for it.

"Had fun?"

"… I think I did, yes."

"That's good." Looking off into the distance, you give Taylor's shoulder a single pat. "Think you can identify and gather up anything useful in this place? We'll need any bodies for easy necromancy, better clean up any guns instead of leaving them for the scavengers and, y'know, that kinda stuff."

Taylor doesn't answer directly, but you can very quickly make out the giant cockroaches dragging stuff behind themselves on harnesses of spider silk, moving in small teams to bring anything vaguely useful out of the old school building.

"That's pretty handy. And saves us the trouble of going in there and gathering stuff up manually."

"Was that a thing you did often?"

"There's a reason I consistently get myself a bunch of minions for this kind of stuff. I started out doing manual labor myself, that doesn't mean I have to keep doing it."

"I see."

It doesn't take much longer from this point on that Kate and Nora return to join yourself and Taylor, so it's just a hop and a skip over to the Easy City Downs, the old horse racing track taken over by a bunch of raiders with old-timey machine guns.

That and a good bit of making sure your loot is properly stored in the Torpid robots you brought along for storage like that, of course.

"Well, time to go ahead and take care of the rest before sunrise."


As you aren't treating this as an opportunity for Taylor to spread her wings a little, your next attack is rather more chaotic, in an 'everyone is unleashing their own preferred methods of mass destruction' kind of way.

That means that Taylor's bugs are all over the place, yes, but there's also Kate firing force-projectiles, bullets, lasers, disintegrating lasers (technically ionized matter, but same difference) and just explosions at any cover between herself and the raiders running around, just blowing up any body parts that would allow any actual resistance before snacking on her victims and chasing after the next ones.

Meanwhile, Nora is turning herself into a literal blender of violence, using her own claws, hemokinesis to create weapons she both wields personally and chucks off to fight at range with and sometimes pulling various guns and actual melee weapons out of her shadow to do the same.

Note to self, somehow there's a difference between just controlling blood and using it to form a giant meat cleaver that can hack a man and the shack he's hiding inside of in two in one swing you use as an actual weapon yourself. It may just be a part of her unique power, too, though.

As for yourself, you're honestly spoiled for choice on what to do, but in the end, you just do what comes naturally. By which you mean you kool-aid-man through walls using your flash step, rewire gravity to make them fall in your direction or else pin them down for you to collect and just mess around in general.

A good time is had by all.

"Hey Gabriel, if we took the shadow of a building and stretched it into a really thin, long and heavy sword, how much destruction would a swing cause?"

Nora's query has you pause for a moment.

"The physics say it would be a bitch to swing and probably break under its own weight, but if it didn't it could probably smash straight through anything short of supernatural materials."

"… Want to try out?"

"Only way to do science I know."

The following Shadow Cut Incident shall not be spoken of. Mainly because you accidentally did a good bit of landscaping using your umbramancy without even really intending to. Such is simply the price of progress.

Also, it's just a minor bit of the landscape. That you cut off and flung into the sea. It happens.


Note to self, actually get the vault set up for prisoners or else build a proper building separate from your house to store them in, at least. Basic professionalism you must've picked up somewhere demands it.


You sit down inside your inner world's lab, calling up a couple of blueprints on a screen to let you brood at them. It's very important for anyone doing science to brood a lot over whatever they're working on, you've found.

"Yoshi, miscellaneous science team," you call out, knowing everyone in the room was already waiting for you to do something anyway. "We have these generators and the water purifiers and they would do their job as they are, but how can we improve on them?"

"I don't know, maybe we could put the signs for radioactive hazards on them," the soul enslaved to your will snarks. "Maybe for explosive and toxic ones as well."

"Please, my fusion cores are perfectly save to handle. Not a single one has had any complete containment failures as of yet." He gives you a look and you shrug. "No unintended ones, anyway."

That's about when Julianne, as she calls herself, steps up, the third soul reincarnated after dying as a researcher in Academy City you picked up and, if you remember correctly, some kind of material sciences specialist. "Actually, if you don't mind, I had a few suggestions for optimizing them. Especially the smaller-scale applications for the water purifiers have a lot of potential to save lives in crisis areas."

"Why bother? He's just going to use them to-" Yoshi is interrupted by Indigo holding a finger before his mouth, the blue-haired woman never far from him.

"Constructive criticism, remember?"

He gnashes his teeth, but takes a deep breath to calm down. Looks like someone got whipped already. "I do not believe it is productive to further work on these projects compared to alternative options."

"Whatever." It's not like you, in particular, actually gave a fuck about his opinion. "You two fuck yet or are you still in that awkward teen phase?"

He chokes, coughing and glaring at you at the same time. Indigo blushes, hiding her face behind a hand, so it falls to Julianne to inform you of things you're too lazy to look up in the archives.

"They did, a lot. It's like they've lost all their brains outside the times they're sneaking out of a locked room together and pretending nobody knows what they got up to."

"Hey!"

"He- coff!" Yoshi does the best he can, but he's still coughing his lings out.

"I really do believe you should seek professional counseling regarding your views on relationships."

"Please, all of my wives are perfectly happy and if not, I'm sure one of them would let me know," you wave the nonsensical criticism off. "But back to the water purifiers- what were you thinking about in particular?"


Water Filter Upgrade

You have 15 points to use to improve your water purifiers

10 Points: Miniaturize: Design a compact miniature model that can be carried by hand (if not easily) with less material requirements and its own integrated fusion core to drive it

4 Points: Plumbing: Add convenient outlets and some basic plumbing to let water be pumped into central gathering spaces from where to move it onward with minimal issues


"Why? Whyyy?"

"Because more fusion cores is all the generators need."

"A single one would have been enough! Why are you adding more?!"

"Because this way they can generate enough electricity to drive entire cities and spaceships!"

"You have no idea how to build a spaceship! I checked!"

"I have plans, Yoshi, and don't believe for a second you don't feature in them!"


It's a brand new day and, like all new days, it is filled with considerations as to what to do and yourself comparing your long-term plans to your short-term needs and desires, having to weigh them against each other more often than not.

This has to be what it feels like to be an adult. You can't say you particularly like the experience, but hey, you're gonna be a dad, better get your game on sooner rather than later now.

That means you actually have to sit down and get to using your very miniscule general reality warping by way of essentially enchanting certain tools and devices for the sake of alchemy you plan to be using in this dimension, too, not to mention Cupcake's insistence at getting your alchemy laboratory established in earnest so she can do more than tag team your captured raiders with Nolac.

Also, you just realized but both of them combined are actually pretty hardcore. Unless you're mistaken, one of said prisoner bloodbags has just gotten up on pretty much completely ruined knees and tried to run for it on all fours- due to the relative lack of ability to do anything more, really, what with the barbed wire drawn through his elbow- and knee joints.

He doesn't make it far, of course, as Nolac steps out of the house used for storage of your bloodbags and shoots him down with a couple syringes filled with bright fluids, but still. Whatever they gave this guy, it sure did psyche him up.

Life is fun in Sanctuary, you guess.

Still, you'll be pretty busy for a bit. "I'll just be doing some basic work today, nothing too exciting. You girls mind exploring the area east of Concord for anything useful? I heard there's some hospital and other medical facilities in the Medford area, so maybe there's some technology I can steal there."

Have to treat your vampire brides right, even if you can't spend all your attention on them. Like you should.

"Not sure anything more advanced than an auto-doc is around, but we can take a look, I guess," Nora says, shrugging while careful not to displace her swollen belly too much. "Worst case we just eat a few things in the area and come back."

"Don't worry, we'll take care of Nora on the way. Right, Taylor?" Kate throws an arm around the tall girl's shoulders, giving you a reassuring grin to match that of the technically youngest vampire you've made.

"You better. Don't let anything with intact limbs near Nora, okay?"

You're not a worrywart. Really, not at all. You're just appropriately careful about the wellbeing of pregnant women, provided you were the one that got them pregnant in the first place of course.


Once you requisition your Cupcake as a helper and tell Nolac to get back to work on actually properly and permanently immobilizing your new blood bags, things to swimmingly, time passing at an annoying rate but progress also being made across the board. Before long, you have yourself a proper alchemy lab with just about everything you'll need in it, thanks to your assistant actually finally pulling her weight once you threaten her with no more mirelurk rations.

"This isn't fair! This whole dimension is just lacking sweets! It's a sweets black hole!"

"Like you don't love the advanced seafood, Cuppie," you faux-mock her. "Now get back to work."

It is, all in all, a fairly quiet day for once. You're occasionally asking for quick status updates from the girls, of course, but it seems Medford isn't too bad as far as the Commonwealth wasteland goes- just full of lots of horrible shit, but Taylor's collecting more giant mutant bugs as they go, so it's not particularly problematic.

Until they get to the supermutants anyway, but big and brutish as those may be, you doubt they'll be a long-lasting problem.


Kate, Nora and Taylor were ducking behind cover, having seen the big, green, muscled and naked humanoid clutching the warhead in a bare hand. They were planning to ransack the Medford Memorial Hospital for anything useful, but it looked like the current inhabitants of the place might have a few words to say about that.

"How is it going to fire that?" Taylor asked, feeling the space out with her smaller bugs.

"It isn't," Nora told her with an exasperated sigh. "They're suicide bombers, I've seen it happen before. He'll just run up to us and slam it into something to blow everything nearby up."

"… How big is a mini-nuke's blast radius?" She asked, already measuring out how far away they had to stay.

"Not too big, but wide enough to cover a street's width. Good thing we're immune to radiation."

"What say you we just go ahead and blow them all up anyway? Most of these guys have a couple rifles at best, this'll be easy," Kate said, peering beyond the corner of the building they were keeping behind.

"I've already got something," Taylor shook her head. Slowly, carefully, she was using several ropes of silk to envelop the warhead and bring a few of her stronger, heavier bugs into position. "… Wait."

Something wasn't right.

All of them turned around simultaneously, seeing the skeletal robot in the general shape of a human walk up to them. "Allied Personnel Confirmed. Greeting Protocols Activated," it said through a speaker installed somewhere inside of its head.

"Oh, a synth." Taylor remembered mentions of these things from the memories Gabriel had shared with everyone involved in this trip. Made by the Institute, which was technically an ally of theirs.

"What's a Gen 1 doing out here?" Kate asked aloud, apparently being taken as making a query to whatever programming this thing had.

"Explanation: Rogue Synth Retrieval. Query: Assistance?"

"Is it asking us for assistance or asking if it can assist us?" Nora asked.

"How would I know? Your son's supposed to be their big boss, remember?"

"Me and Shaun are a little out of touch, as you well know."

Taylor, however, was gazing into the alley out of which the synth had stepped… And the many similar figures she could sense moving through her bugs.

"I think they want to help us," she said to forestall any more bickering. "Do you think we should just call in the undead and the robots Gabriel lent us?"

Her two older companions looked where she was looking, the light rattling of synthetic materials moving becoming more easily discernable.

"… Well shit, why not, I guess. Now that we have all of the fodder here already."

"Where do you think a rogue synth would be hiding out around here?" Nora asked.

"Probably the metro station below us. I think there's raiders inside." Taylor's swarm was everywhere, but the places humans frequented and spread trash around were easy to find just because some bugs were always around them in this dimension.

"Guess we have a couple more targets, too, then. Want to split up ooor…"

At Kate's words, Nora snorted. "Never divide the party. Gabriel would never let us live it down if any of us got a scratch here."

It made Taylor feel warm inside to be cared about like that, both by him and the two women she was traveling with, even if they rarely said it aloud.

Undeath wasn't shaking out to be bad at all so far.


The hospital hadn't proven to be any particularly great hindrance. The supermutants, as they were called, were aggressive and easily qualified as superhuman due to their sheer size, toughness, speed and strength, but in the end that was all they had. Against someone with many, many expendable minions and perfect clarity of their relative positions, they had lost before the battle had even begun.

Not to mention the direct power brought to bear by them. "Hold still!" Kate was using that particular power termed as 'domination', immobilizing opponents so as to jam her rifle against their faces left and right. "Boom, baby, boom!"

The resulting head explosions made short work of the relatively small skulls of the large mutants, while drinking their blood quickly enough let them gain their souls regardless of the instant death these executions brought to bear.

Firing squads made of robots and synths (Was there even any point in differentiating between these ones?) were clearing out the hallways and riddling any enemies found full of holes, though it had to be said supermutants were capable of fighting back for at least a few moments more often than not, even against this tide of metal and bright, shiny laser beams. Casualties were had, though far from enough to meaningfully stop any of what was happening.

And Nora, of course, was just massacring everything in her way, belying her pregnant and vulnerable appearance. Taylor may need to learn more martial arts from her, folding beings twice her size in half had to be a useful ability.

However, the supermutants' leaders had, somehow, managed to lock themselves in one of the operating areas. Already Taylor was seeking out an alternative way inside, but then she hesitated.

She did take that mini-nuke from the unarmored mutant earlier…

A quick application of what was technically a breaching charge later, she sent her swarm inside in a black tide of chitin hiding the radroaches and the bloatflies, keeping her bloodbugs in reserve. Or rather, sending them out to quell all remaining resistance elsewhere in the building while she personally took care of the ones ahead.

Taylor bent over, her limbs stretching and straining against the ground as she dissolved into several bloodbugs ready to strike the moment the mutants let their guards down or were webbed up too badly to defend themselves.

It was, in the end, a very short battle. Many souls were collected, however.


One of the zombies Taylor had raised went down, destroyed through immense volume of fire. Most of the metro station had been easy to go through, the raiders within scattered and easy targets, but they had taken up defensive positions including at least one turret at the last chokehold deep inside.

"Rise, my fleshly servant, and go forth to fulfill my will!" Luckily, she had brought all the intact supermutant corpses with them, carried by the robots.

"Man, it's so weird to have someone other than Gabe do this," Kate said from where she was leaning against the wall.

"You're doing great Taylor, they'll run out of bullets soon enough," Nora added with a smile.

Taylor couldn't wait to be able to create more advanced undead like Gabriel did.


"Come on, come on, I thought you wanted sweets?"

"No fair! Gimme! Gimme!"

"Wheeeee!"

Grinning, you hold up the sweets fairy you created, shaking it above Cupcake's head.

You do hope the girls have as much fun as you do.


The return of the victorious conquerors is greeted by yourself receiving them with several slices of various cakes whose ingredients are nigh impossible to get in this dimension and several bowls of generic adjacent sweets available to all.

"Hey girls, you all had fun?"

Turns out that yes, they did.

Kate was exhilarated to properly blow up a bunch of stuff again while Nora is happy and sated on the souls of their victims, several supermutants and raiders they found in the Medford area, though they didn't really get to the Med-Tek facility they were also originally planning to plunder along the way.

There's always a next time, however, so you're sure they'll get to it at some point.

As for Taylor…

"I will have to make my costume already. The protection of aura compounds with it." Both hands busy with her plate and her cake, she's started giving a mission review all on her own, recounting what happened and how to improve for next time.

Probably something Sarah taught her.

"I mean, with your power, you could just cover yourself in chitin once you learn how to transform partially," you suggest mildly, being just that much more knowledgeable on the topic of what certain vampire powers and categories thereof can be used to achieve.

"I'll need to train that." And there you go.

"Oh no," Kate groans playfully, not bothering to hide her smile, "he's started corrupting Taylor."

"To be fair, self-improvement isn't that bad as far as pet peeves like this go," Nora notes, holding out a piece of cake for you to eat.

Which you do. With relish. Being fed by the people you love is great.

"I have to make use of what I have." Taylor, determined, clenches a fist. You reach over to pat her head.

Good girl.

"Before you do that, would you mind coming with me to the mirelurk farm we set up at that excavation site? I want to test something and see if you have any suggestions for improvement through your power."

"Okay."


Thicket Excavations, your big 'mirelurk ranch', is coming along nicely now that you're back, the people you assigned to making this operation work not having been idle ever since you last came by.

For one, the fenced grazing areas have been expanded, standardized and seen several improvements and additions made, from simple feeding troughs that can be loaded up and shoved over the fences with relative ease to several internal barriers that can be raised or lowered to better herd the mirelurks and actually let their minders get inside to clean up without risking life and limb.

You approve. Feeding the farmhands to the animals on the regular is a bad business model.

That said, a lot of more changes have been made to actually make this old quarry livable. The fenced space up on normal ground has been removed entirely, most likely to prevent any escaping mirelurks from having an easy time, but the meat (mild pun, there) of things has been done inside the small tunnels and elevated platforms within the quarry itself formerly used by the raiders that tried to take over after it was pumped dry.

Actual shabby huts like seen in many wasteland settlements were raised in some areas, replacing repurposed trailer homes where they don't incorporate them instead, the empty spaces hewn into stone now used to store ranch equipment and preparatory space before one descends to the bottom of things where the connected mirelurks habitats lurk.

Well, it's about time someone went and gave these guys some more advanced tools than long metal sticks to shoo or lure the thing around, you suppose. But first…

"So are these close enough to crabs for your power to work on them?" You ask, turning towards Taylor who came teleporting with you.

"They are." The dark-haired girl tilts her head. "Their biology is a little strange."

"No kidding, they're mutated horror shellfish combining traits from several species." You think, anyway.

"Just give me a moment. I think a few of them tried to dig their way out using their claws. Or pincers, not sure which word applies."

"What, like old-timey prison break movies?"

"Exactly like that. They might even have cooperated to distract the humans watching them."

"… You know, I hate how easily I believe that might have happened."


A few conversations while Taylor flexes her power muscles later, you have a good picture of where thing stand exactly and what to do to make them better. In addition to, of course, letting them know of the inmates' escape plans.

For one, the mirelurks have a bad habit of trying to pull the ranchers you have stationed here into their pits by grabbing anything they can, including the long prodding sticks they use to get them to move. More than a few of them have ended up abandoned and left to the water until the next round cleaning in a particular habitat space.

Which is why you do a few experiments, inadvertently grill a mirelurk alive and just like that you have an improved stick capable of dispensing an electric shock that can force them to let go if they try to wrest it away. The charge is intense enough to seriously injure or kill humans, of course, but reliably can get them to more or less behave now.

You make sure to actually teach the people here how to make more and make them swear not to go and kill each other with them… or, worse, let the mirelurks take them and reverse their roles somehow.

You don't think they would be able to do that… but better safe than sorry and all that.

What's more, after consulting with Taylor, you install a system of small, artificial dams to let parts of the habitats be flooded with more water and add a few piles of dirt and soil, more closely simulating the natural environments of mirelurks that don't just live underwater their whole life, as your spawn is fairly sure they would be able to.

Interesting creatures, really. Just also a massive pain in the ass to manage properly.

Hopefully, they'll reproduce more with these changes made, going from the occasional egg here and there to a full nest or two with this.


Giving the building used as a temporary prison one last look, you nod, assured the raiders interred within won't be up to doing any escaping whatsoever for a few hours at least- losing chunks of their souls to you is as strenuous as you would have hoped, contrary to the common wastelander opinion of raiders as soulless bastards one and all and all that jazz.

With that taken care of, you quickly get out, joining the rest of your vamps in teleporting to Concord- into the Minutemen HQ, that is, where you've had them overlook preparations for tonight's big mission.

Well, 'big'. It's more medium-sized by your standards.

"Hey Preston, everything going smooth?" You greet the man you made the General, walking right into his office.

"Gabriel, good, you're here!" You think you may be seeing some measure of desperation in his eyes. "You have to help me talk sense into Nora, she can't go into heavy combat in her condition!"

"I'll be fine, I'm better protected than you'd think," the black-haired woman waves him off, lounging on a chair inside.

"… As long as she promises to stay in the back, I think it'll be fine," you say. "Aside from that, how are preparations going?"

"We have fifty armed men and women inside the new flying Torpids and a good idea of the area thanks to a couple veterans that knew how the Castle looked back when it was under our control. Is there anything else we need?"


Preston Garvey took a deep, calming breath as he watched on, eyes studying the terrain laid out in front of him.

He wasn't really a big thinker in this sense, he thought, the kind that just needed to glance at a battlefield and know what to do, that could command with surety and steel in their voice to forge their men into a hammer that would crush the enemy in single blow.

All the same, he was in the position he was in, so there was nothing in for it except to fake it as best he could and pray. Pray and ask Gabriel what to do, as he was the most qualified guy (or gal, not judging) around to actually make the decisions here.

They were inside of one of the Torpid robots, flying high above the battlefield with a good view of it thanks to one of the screens around them. It was a bit far and didn't show any of the mirelurks waiting for them (yet), but it did increase brightness to let him see the Castle as though it were midday instead of too early in the morning for the sun to have risen.

The marvels of Gabriel's technology.

They had to be moving at this time, as Preston understood it, to avoid being seen by any of the denizens of Boston below them, just in case any managed to attack their flying transports so high up above the ground. The whole area was littered with dangerous creatures and raiders filling it to the brim, so he got that, totally.

They still needed to stop, though, now that they'd arrived. This was it. The Castle. They took it back, they would be proving to all that the Minutemen were back and better than… forever, or at least longer than most folks could think back.

They didn't and they'd be failures. He'd be a failure, if Gabriel was in command all along Preston couldn't imagine any such thing happening.

"Okay, Gabriel, what… What do you think we should do?" It was a little pathetic, but he figured it was better to just ask someone smarter than to fail because he didn't.

"Hmm… There is that big fat gap in the wall. Could just send everyone in guns blazing." Preston got the impression there was a but in there. "But we could just have Taylor walk in and take care of things the easy way."

Behind them, the girl with the long hair and the glasses stirred.


Well, Preston wasn't some expert on anything, but if he said it… Gabriel probably had a reason to.

"Could you do it? I don't want to see you endanger yourself any more than necessary, but-"

"It's fine," she said, getting up and dusting off her legs. "I just need to get down and get in range."

A small flash of muted light, so faint it was hard to pick up without having seen it a bunch of times, and she was gone, joining the Minutemen on the ground only to stride straight through them towards the Castle.

"She'll be alright, won't she?"

"Don't worry, Taylor has the situation under control." Gabriel was stone cold and relaxed, meaning Preston could only take his word on it.

There was a bit of a commotion among the volunteers that'd come as the young woman walked right up to the Castle. However, it soon became apparent that she wouldn't be stopped and just like that, she was standing in the breach.

Then, slowly but surely, mirelurks came out. The Minutemen readied their weapons, ready to shoot to defend her, at least, but they didn't attack- they just went past her, walking along in that weird way they did with their many legs.

They were positioning themselves, almost as if…

"There you go. Just have them shot."

That was one way to do things, Preston supposed. He suppressed the shiver going down his spine at how something that had been promising to be a dangerous battle had been reduced to some routine exercise so easily.

If this could be done with humans, too… Better not to think about it.

The recovery of the Castle was turning out to require a bit more work yet, as even with all the dozens upon dozens of mirelurks streaming out to be killed in short order- there had to be hundreds of them- there still were the nests set all around the old stonework of the fortifications.

There was a reason they had swarmed the Castle the moment there wasn't any serious opposition left- mirelurks loved nesting in places like this, with lots of rough stone and nooks and crannies to bury their eggs inside dirt and grime, where they would incubate undisturbed.

It was primary breeding ground. Little wonder they would go for it given half a chance.

Now they were excising the things again, which involved a lot of molotov cocktails Preston thanked his past self for having ordered brought along. The nests were tough, just as tough as the broodlings that often sprung forth to attack anything close by, even on fire and dying by the droves.

The cleanup would take much longer, but at least they would have all living mirelurks done w-

"Gruauauaugh!"

"Shit, what was that?" Preston was immediately glad not many people were around to hear him. He had to portray confidence at all times now. But the scream of the something enormous was still alarming to hear.

"A large mirelurk. I think it might be the next step in their life cycle if they live long enough," the girl that'd shut down the creatures, Taylor, said.

"You have it under control?" Gabriel asked.

"Yes. Look to the other wall breach."

Preston and Gabriel did, seeing… seeing an enormous creature rising from the waves and lumbering towards the Castle on eight long, chitinous limbs.

"It can spit acid from its mandibles, rapidly incubate newborn mirelurks and fire them like living projectiles and I think it's really strong and fast physically." Preston was halfway tuning out the explanation as background noise already.

"A mirelurk queen," he whispered.

"… Do you think we can keep it?" Gabriel asked.

"Not in the long term. It's liable to slip my control sooner or later if it manages to get out of range."

"That sounds bad," Preston said faintly.

"And teleportation is likely to do that," Gabriel nodded. "Can you turn into a copy?"

"… It's too big," Taylor replied with a shake of her head. "I don't have enough mass. Maybe if I practice towards that."

"It's something to look forward to, at least."

Preston had no idea what was even going on anymore, but the Minutemen weren't being decimated by one of the most deadly creatures of the Commonwealth. That was a good first step.


Preston had seen a good few things in his time. He'd watched friends die, the Minutemen crumble like sand between everyone's fingers, the people he was sworn to protect die to ghouls and starvation and wasteland creatures. He'd seen how things looked like at rock bottom.

He'd also seen how things could change, how the Minutemen were raised from the grave by the seat of their pants and kept going on sheer momentum because, despite everything, people still wanted to do good. How Concord was built with nothing but elbow grease, hundreds of robots and some careful thought.

This was still the perhaps most disturbing sight of his life.

Gabriel was climbing over the mirelurk queen's shell, searching for an opening. His face was already smeared with the green-ish, stinking, mucky and viscous blood of the enormous creature.

"How many circulatory systems does this thing even have?"

"At least three," Taylor told him from the ground. "Try hitting the trachea."

"I have no idea where that is on this thing!" The man Preston considered his perhaps best, if very, very odd, friend had to shout a little to be heard due to how high up he was.

"A little to the right."

"My right or yours or its?"

"Yours."

… Whatever worked best to kill it, Preston supposed.


Preston cleared his throat, standing on the wooden platform raised above the rest of the courtyard at the heart of the Castle.

"Hey everyone, glad you're here with me today… Or still night, technically, I guess." He earned himself a couple chuckles. Asking Gabriel to help him come up with a speech was the right idea. "I don't think I have to tell you all why we're here or what we've done. You were there, you got your own hands dirty and you did your damn part. More than anyone could expect anyone else to do."

It was always a big part of the Minutemen. Everyone that joined was a volunteer, anyone could leave at any time if they wanted. So when they stuck in there and risked their lives, it meant something.

"So when I tell you that I am proud of us and what we have achieved, as I hope you are proud in yourselves, and I hope that you can believe me when I say that this? This is where we truly start." Preston had no idea what to do with his hands, but the general tips he'd gotten kicked in so he moved a few steps to the left and right.

"The Castle is back with us, now. Back when we lost it, the Minutemen began their big decline, they became more and more meaningless as time moved on. Now we are back and we can finally reach out to the entire Commonwealth again like we should be."

He knew a couple of people had their reservations- the New Minutemen had been active predominantly around Concord and Concord only despite their mission statement being to protect the people in all of the Commonwealth, but it wasn't like they had been able to cover the entire area from the start.

Baby steps.

"The Minutemen are back and we can and will let everyone know about this single fact. The radio station is being rebuilt as we speak and soon we will be riding out in more style than ever."

He gestured and two lines of robots walked in, looking kind of like very weird Barhmins or those Giddyup Buttercup things. Gabriel had told him they were based of 'horses', but Preston had no idea what those even were.

Still, they were also large enough a man in power armor could be riding them if he wanted to and fast enough to outrun a hungry supermutant. That was all that counted.

"These," Preston announced, "will be our Steeds. Welcome to a new era for the Minutemen, one way or another."


"You know, why am I even doing this? It's not like I'm actually a technician or anything," you grumble under your breath.

"Oh, grow up you big baby." Nora is paying you company, at least. She knows you prefer to have her nearby so you can keep an eye on her just in case; that's just how you are when one of your wives is pregnant. "It's nothing too complicated, is it?"

"Just needs a couple parts replaced and grime cleared out to be functional, this old stuff is pretty robust," you shake your head, your claws carefully scratching old muck out of the expansive radio system you are most certainly going to link into your own system to teleport literally everywhere it reaches if you can swing it. "Or it would if I was just restoring it."

"So you're improving it?"

"I'm rearranging a few things," you answer evasively. "And adding a few fusion cores. A dozen or so, to be sure."

WHYYYYYY?!

Because.

"Oh, what's the added energy for?" Nora may not be an expert engineer, but simple concepts like more fusion cores equaling more electricity or whatever else you're using them for at the time certainly aren't beyond her.

"Just a little multi-functionality, letting it run several frequencies at once and masking a certain signal that swings with all of them."

Just then, Kate shows up, carrying a couple plates. "Hey guys, want some mirelurk BBQ? We don't have any sauce, but they're really juicy by themselves."

"Sure." The things actually are pretty tasty, you'll be the first to admit. There's a reason you're having the queen teleported back to Sanctuary for later. "Where's Taylor?"

"She went out to explore the sea and find any nearby mirelurk colonies. Guess she'll be back in an hour or so?" Kate shrugs.

"Long as she's having fun."


You sit upon your laboratory throne, pondering, as ever, the scientific advancement of yourself and only yourself and by extension those that work under you to bring said advancement upon you through their own work to be added to your comprehensive list of all the cool superior science you have accumulated.

"You do know that's not how science works, right?"

You shush your traitorous and not really all that educated advisor ("Hey!") to return to your pondering. What is the one thing you need to enhance the rate of science-ing possible for you right now?

"Please stop. It's physically painful now."

"Shut up, Yoshi," you order absent-mindedly. "Or actually, better idea. Design a robotic lab assistant that can be adapted to as many fields of study as possible. Use the Bob model as a base and go from there, you can't be trusted to do anything from scratch."

"And why not? Not like you have any standards for this whatsoever."

"Because you hate me and would try to sabotage the project somehow. This way I know exactly where you started and can spot any attempts immediately."

"… Did I ever tell you how incredibly frustrating you are to work with?"

"Only about a couple times," you shrug. "Now if you'll excuse me, I can hear the footsteps of your little lover and some Latin chanting, so I'll make myself scarce and look over your results later."

And lo and behold, this approach actually works. Once again you have proven to be the superior scientist.

By making other scientists work for you. A foolproof plan, at worst you can blame someone else for the lack of results and at best you get exactly what you want.

And you did get exactly what you want. Yoshi even went and gave it syringes for easier testing of various substances on prisoners and the like! In addition to finely adjusted manual manipulators to interface with miscellaneous lab equipment. Your attitude of just making a 'one size fits all' robot that you can throw in and work with as is instead of filling whole buildings with extremely precise machinery for more advanced experiments that requires it has to be rubbing off on him.


Getting all of the mirelurk bodies moved back to Concord using just your Torpids would be pure pain, organizationally speaking, so you're just having them teleported normally after a few careful calibrations. It's a bit fiddly, but you can get them more or less where you want to.

Preston said something about just handing out the meat if you didn't have any actual use for it- you don't, you can just use raiders who are significantly less naturally tasty for necromancy if and when you're pressed for that- and making this an official celebration, which led to you suggesting something along the lines of making it 'freedom Day' or something; Americans, no matter how far into the post-apocalypse, are just genetically predisposed to spontaneously jumping in joy when the right buzzwords are brought up in your experience.

Well, free mirelurk meat is good and all, you suppose. Bread and circuses, the two most important parts of keeping a population happy and content to do whatever you tell it to.

That said, there is… one other thing.

You look at the round object the size of a grown man's torso Taylor is holding up to show you, the faint green glow coming from its otherwise pearly white surface casting an eerie glow on the surroundings.

"I found it in a giant clam way off the coastline," she explains, using a bunch of bugs to wring the water out of her hair carefully as they move all throughout it. "It was large enough to swallow mirelurks whole, which is what I think it feeds off of. Somehow."

"… Well it's not actually radioactive," Nora says, holding out the arm bearing her trusty pip-boy. "The Geiger counter doesn't detect anything, at least."

"Guess we'll just keep it around just in case." Despite your words, you overlay Yoshi really quickly, wrangling his mind into the background with the ease of practice to use his heroic power on the thing. Calcium carbonate, conchiolin, some water, trace elements of various industrial chemicals you recognize, a whole bunch of mirelurk leftovers, some background radiation you are't sure should be quite possible…

This'll be interesting just based on however it's actually producing light, somehow.

"I like it. Does this count as a souvenir?"

You pat taylor's head. It's a semi-autonomous reaction at this point. "You found it on a stroll on the beach and it looks pretty enough. Counts in my book."


"Happy Freedom Day, ma'am! I hope I find you in good spirits?"

Codsworth had seen some rough times for a robot butler, if he said so himself, ever since sir and ma'am had made their way into the Vault to escape the bombs. Good thing they did, too, for all that sir never made it out alive and little Shaun had apparently made a career for himself in the Institute before ma'am was unfrozen.

At least she was back. And just maybe things weren't all that bad, after all.

"Thank you Codsworth," his only master left in this world smiled. "You've been doing well for yourself with the people in Concord, I take it?"

"Just so, ma'am," he agreed. It warmed his circuits to have these little tasks again. "I know a few people and they know me back. My model never was meant to be anything more than a domestic help, but I believe I am doing rather well at socializing regardless."

"That's good to hear. I've been a bit worried about you, you know?"

"Perish the thought, ma'am!" He may have been a bit emotional, sure, but to finally see Nora again after all those years of uncertainty, waiting for her or her husband or maybe Shaun or his descendants to rise from the Vault had been incredibly moving. He had not believed what his visual processors were telling him at the time and, truthfully, for weeks afterwards.

Not that minor details like that truly mattered. Not with Mister Livsey around. Speaking of which…

"I actually have something for you, ma'am. To celebrate the occasion. Freedom Day is an auspicious enough moment for this, I believe." The people of Concord were absolutely exuberant, feasting on plentiful of mirelurks and specially prepared tatos cut up and fried in their juices- it might become a local specialty, even. It had also been the perfect time to visit one of his contacts, however.

Dropping the name of Sanctuary was usually enough to secure some manner of cooperation from the average Concordite or at least bring some attention upon whatever Codsworth was doing at the moment. Their home was as well-known as it was prestigious, a fact he made full use of to gain the acquaintances he needed among the craftspeople attracted to the newly established city.

"Oh, you shouldn't have, Codsworth."

"No, no, I insist, ma'am." And he did, he really did. Rotating his lower body by 180 degrees, he presented the small package to Nora. "Besides, much as I would have, I could not think of any material goods within my means that would be of use to you directly. So I focused instead on the next member of your family to be."

His master's hand lowered to cover her belly, advancing pregnancy easily visible with but a single look. Codsworth knew how shaken and destroyed she had been after her husband's death, but to see her find new love, even from a short distance due to the turbulent lifestyle their environment demanded, once again flooded his processors with joy.

The world may have beaten them down, but Nora was not staying there. Instead, she was actively building a new life for herself and her new family, unusually as it may be structured. Not to mention a new young master or mistress Codsworth would be helping to care for- his very raison d'etre, the primal programming at the base of everything he was, meant this was naught but a trifle compared to what he would do if he had the opportunity.

Before him, the expecting mother carefully unravelled the package, revealing, one by one, the simple children's toys he had commissioned from the best craftsman claiming to be working with wood he could find in Concord. Simple toy soldiers, a small rocking horse, a similarly small model gun and, most of all, a simple mobile much like the one little Shaun loved to play with as a baby, all carved out of the best wood available and lovingly processed and painted.

"It isn't much, but it was the best the wasteland could offer," he explained. "Not to be too forward, but it was my hope that-"

Codsworth was interrupted by the ma'am pulling him against her shoulder in a one-armed hug.

"Oh, Codsworth. You really are the best, even after all these years. Well, the best friend a mother could hope for," she said playfully.

"I believe a Miss Nanny would argue against that statement, ma'am."

"Well none of them are around, are they? Mister Handies were just built more robust for some reason. You're part of this family too, you know."

She released him, making Codsworth wonder what possessed him more; familial love or the regret of having no arms flexible enough to have return her hug. "Oh, ma'am… I don't know what to say."

"One thing I've learned from Gabriel is that sometimes, words aren't needed." His mistress gave him a pat on his middle eye, the familiar gesture ensuring he would be crying if he had tear ducts- and not out of physical irritation in his eyes.

Codsworth bobbed in the air, sharing agreement. Mister Livsey was many things, but few could argue against his wisdom in these matters.


"It's sooo coool!" Cupcake squeals, running in a circle around the floating robot. "It has syringes and replaceable, adjustable cup holders!"

… Is this a little of how Yoshi feels when you deliberately formulate everything to get on his nerves?

"What else can it do?! Can it fire lasers? Can it lift people to reach up to the ceiling?" She gasps, little hands balled into fists in her excitement trembling. "Can it-"

"It can do pretty much all your lab work much more precise than a human or even most vampires could, though it's not as good as a specialized machine. And yes, it can fire lasers, what do you take my engineering for?" Because like hell would you not have included that feature, much to your chief science soul's dismay.

"It's so cool…"

"… Are you drooling?"

"So what if I am? I just got the greatest birthday present ever even though it isn't even my birthday! Nor Christmas!"

You repress the urge to sigh. "You're welcome, Noodle Cup."

"Mouu!"


Now then, with the Minutemen establishing themselves much more, most of your short-term projects done or unavailable at the moment and Cupcake in possession of her new robotic helper slash minder (she really, really needs the latter in some capacity), you figure it's about time you went ahead and dealt with that signal Preston notified you about.

… The Brotherhood of Steel, as you understand it from the common knowledge you've managed to piece together, is essentially a big bunch of religious fanatics that went and decided that advanced technology is something supposed to be kept out of the hands of the common man and 'preserved' by themselves, meaning they use it themselves instead. Because apparently, humanity is not prepared to use it responsibly and cannot be trusted with anything more advanced than farming tools or something.

It's all very hypocritical and, frankly, stupid. Like any normal religion, in other words! You were a bit worried for a bit, but it turns out as crazy as Earth Fallout is, a few fundamental rules of society persist still. With any luck, the people claiming to be part of the Brotherhood will have died by now and you can loot some information off of them in case someone kept a diary.


Sometimes, it has to be said, sometimes it is good to be the next best thing to a motherfucking god this entire shitheap of a wasteland knows.

Hence you approach what used to be Cambridge back when Boston still actually stood not on foot nor as a shadow ghosting along the ground, but instead chilling out on board of your personal bullhead, built to your specifications inside the RobCo facility you've renovated and improved upon with Isabel's help. The view is surprisingly nice, in a 'post-apocalypse chic' kind of way where the ruins and what you can make out of the buildings that used to fill the landscape once upon a time create a picture of what would have been in stark contrast to what is now.

It's not exactly something you'd call artistically pleasing… But if portrayed from the right perspective, it could be. You may or may not have somewhat of an eye for such things by now.

So it is that you approach what is commonly known as Cambridge through what signs and maps have persisted to this day, the relatively intact grouping of buildings sticking out along the street you're following flying through the air. Normally, your simple autopilot wouldn't be something you'd trust with that, as it really works much better off of coordinates and relative positions you can accurately input, but that is precisely why you're using the soul of that one raider you ate once upon a time capable of merging with machines to steer instead.

Hey, you're collecting craploads of souls on the off chance some of them may be useful, of course you're actually putting them to use whenever you can. That's just common sense.

However, as you keep an eye on the onboard camera's view, you quickly see something you aren't sure what to make of yet; there's a lot of movement between the tattered buildings and simple constructions marking the area while red blasts of energy lance through the area with relative regularity. Not unlike what laser muskets being fired would look like, though distinct enough you can tell that it would be a different kind of weapon if so.

Someone is fighting something down there and you would bet the laser weapons are being used by the people from the Brotherhood. Huh.


Well, to be fair to the situation at hand, you did kind of expect things to involve at least one fight from the moment you were told about a distress signal. There's only so many reasons someone would send one of those out around the wasteland.

Sighing in mild annoyance nevertheless, you get up, stretching your neck in an empty gesture merely serving to pretend you still suffer from the foibles of a living person. Never being sore, never aching or chafing (at least not easily), undeath does have its draws.

Still, it's good practice to keep up such misleading little habits. That's what really sells them, in the end.

"Keep the bullhead in the air for a bit, be back in a few," you order your summoned soul pilot, hitting the switch that has the door to one side of your flying vehicle open up.

Then you jump, not bothering to wait for a response.

It has been a while, you idly consider as you fall through the air, since you actually didn't bother flying while you were this high up, whether through your powers or while transformed into something with wings. As the ground rushes towards you, filling your view wider and wider, your body held tensely just so you don't flop all over the place, you spend a fraction of a second to decide how you want to land over the rushing howl of the wind.

Levitation, the negation of gravity at your fucking leisure, is great. You aren't entirely sure about how the physics work out, but it even negates any kinetic force applied through gravity and already affecting your body on top. This is how and why it is possible for you to impact the ground, torn-up street that it is, with a single outstretched finger, head pointed downwards and all.

You take a moment to enjoy just being able to do this shit before you push and partially re-enable gravity, easily hopping to your feet. Having fun with your cosmic power is almost as important as having it in the first place.

Then you hear the snarling growls on feral ghouls nearby, the wretched things already moving. Looking around, it looks a lot like there was a fight between raiders and a horde of them, the former having actually rudimentally fortified their position by moving debris and car wrecks around and create elevated areas from which to fire.

Also a couple of land mines.

Somehow, this whole situation is starting to look more and more unnecessarily complicated. At least you're fairly sure the ghouls are also attacking the police station the survivors from the Brotherhood have holed up in from the glimpses you caught on the way down of the fighting and the actual wall they built, for one.


While it may be a bit of a waste of effort, depending on how this shakes out, you still make it a point to at least pretend to be human still as you make your way toward the battlefield apparently indicative of the Brotherhood of Steel's presence. Numerous ghouls are lingering throughout the surroundings, not swarming towards the noise of heavy laser fire for some reason, instead choosing to come at you.

Fun fact, plasma fire melts irradiated, wrinkled flesh just as easily as anything else. Last Embrace mows the creatures down in droves, occasionally firing off solid projectiles and lasers against lone or fewer targets when you feel like changing it up a little.

Wearing what amounts to some kind of artillery on your arms is wonderful. Sure, anyone less durable might have some trouble simply due to the immense heat involved peeling their skin from their flesh through sheer proximity or something, but some decent engineering to actually direct the plasma you're squirting like Sarah when she's especially happy, but some decent engineering involved from the planning phase to direct the blast properly and your general toughness mean it really isn't that dangerous for yourself.

Just for others, which is the whole point of having a weapon.

Anyway, the smattering of ghouls you encounter isn't any big issue, not like the things ever really are. Ghouls are tougher than normal humans, faster and feral in most cases, but their only real methods of attack are to throw themselves at people, then claw and bite at them. Only an issue in close quarters and, admittedly, quite lethal in those, especially in larger packs as they tend to travel in.

You, however, are just so much stronger, faster and tougher than them that no amount of feral ghouls is any real problem. It feels good, knowing how far you've come and how easily you can just no-sell something that would be a human's sure death. Proof of how far you've come, not that you really need it at this point.

Then you come upon the actual battlefield, beyond the bodies of raiders and ghouls riddled to pieces. And, well…

These guys sure are working through a lot of ghouls.

The barriers stacked up to a wall are keeping out the worst of it, but there have to have been a couple hundred ghouls easily, most of them now corpses littering the outside. They deliberately left an opening, too, just to have a place the ghouls would swarm right through and be easy targets for consistent fire.

And consistent fire they receive. Three figures are standing in the courtyard created in front of the station, two clad in some weird armor you'd expect an engineer to have cobbled together and later improved upon, one in heavy power armor… Except without a helmet on for some yourself-forsaken reason.

Why… Why is he even wearing power armor like this?

Then he kicks away a ghoul that got past the concentrated firepower of three laser rifles, explaining that much, at least. Still appalling, but at least he's using the enhanced strength and reach for something.

Every droning blast of red pierces several rotting bodies, spearing through and incinerating their flesh en masse, yet still some do make it through despite the carefully set up defenses. Just then, you see a couple breaching, storming up and distracting the guy in power armor long enough to let a couple of them maul the dude in 'normal' wear- the other one is female, for the record.

Looks like they're just about to be overran, or at least take casualties. Time for you to step in, you suppose.

Muscling your way past the ghouls you hid from for a bit to observe, you turn around, smashing a couple aside and executing them with quick shots to their heads. "You okay over there?" You ask, voice raised to push through the noise of battle.

"We will be," the black dude, you see now that you are looking in through your eyes instead of with your blood sense, growls, savaging the ghouls that made it past the perimeter. "Behind y-"

You raise an arm over your own shoulder, Last Embrace's insides moving almost imperceptably as it thirsts for crime. Then you unleash a stream of plasma, white hot energy washing over everything.

The barricade only gets melted a little. Really, it's good as undamaged.

The sound of your plasma roaring now that you unleash it fully is too great, the air 'fwoosh'ing in the sudden heat and ghouls being flash-fried and carbonized to nothing but coal and ash, so you simply wait until you're done with them, the remaining horde throwing itself against the emanation of your weapons fruitlessly just like before.

When it is finally done, you smile. "Nothing better than completely mindless enemies," you let the people presumably from the Brotherhood know.

"… Indeed, civilian. You might be on to something." And Mister No Helmet agrees, too, what a pleasant surprise.


Pushing the burnt edifice that is left of the broad mass of ghoul still alive by the time you intervened away to clear out the path into the free space containing the combatants left takes little effort, the ashen mass crumbling and giving way under your fingers, so taking care of that takes just a couple moments.

You have other people or minions to clean up for you normally, but you kind of don't want to reveal any of that right now and all, so this much you'll tolerate. Even if you get soot all over your damn hands immediately.

Still, you go to join the group nearby, the guy that got scratched up pretty badly earlier being tended to by the female Brotherhood member. Which, come to think of it, sounds kind of weird, but hey, fanatics.

They'll do as they do.

"Greetings, civilian. I am Paladin Danse from the Brotherhood of Steel." You get the feeling this guy always talks like he kind of has a stick up his ass. Just a little premonition.

"Gabriel Livsey, if we're doing introductions," you languidly proclaim. "I picked up on the distress message sent from here and decided to come take a look."

"Yes." Danse suppresses a grimace, you think. "We have been under constant attack ever since we entered the Commonwealth; the three of us you see now are the only ones remaining. Speaking of, Scribe Haylen?"

"He'll make it, but he won't be mobile," Hayden, apparently, says, shaking her head as she jabs a stimpack into the wounded man.

"Which leaves us in a difficult position. We are unable to continue our mission or even venture from the police station as is and are cut off from the rest of the Brotherhood."

Ooh, sure sucks to be him, you suppose.

"Oh, what kind of mission?" You ask, pretending to be mildly interested at most. "No offense, but the Brotherhood isn't exactly a common sight around these parts."

"We were meant to confirm rumours about the activities of the 'Institute' menacing the people of the Commonwealth." Dammit Shaun, you had one job!


You stay around a little longer, sharing some information you deem a good influence on events- yes, the Minutemen are having a resurgence and they seem on the up-and-up, helping people and all that good stuff (without mentioning the tech they use to do so), there's a lot of activity out towards the East and maybe that's something to look into and, of course, information on the Institute itself is scarce, but maybe investigating around Diamond City would bear fruit, just because it's got the most people of any single place in the Commonwealth and you heard it might be targeted by the shady organization.

Basic bits of misinformation like that. Of course you also make sure they know you aren't absolutely sure about any of this stuff, but you're kind of their only real source of information unless they spontaneously develop a way to interrogate feral ghouls somehow.

Ultimately, however, you have your own shit to get back to, so you 'regretfully' decline the offer to stay around the police station for a while longer and return to 'the settlement you operate out of'.

You aren't entirely sure what the Brotherhood guys will make of this encounter, but hopefully it'll let you delay any actual problems they cause. In the meantime…

You teleport around real quick, then come walking into the Institute, going trough the designated teleportation chamber. "Hello, hello! I have bad news, good news and really bad news, which ones should I scream aloud first?"

An intercom activates, letting Shaun sigh through it. "I'll be down to see you shortly."


Shaun, as it happens, is not particularly happy about the news you're bringing, if a lot more aware of the delicate situation at hand than you would've expected.

"The Brotherhood of Steel is approaching regardless of these members you encountered. Their leader has already been replaced by a synth copy and my original plan was to use him as an infiltrator after the feral ghouls killed the rest of his team, though perhaps this solution you applied is more constructive."

You're joining him inside his office today, one wall dominated by a pane of glass to let Shaun look down at some central hub area within the Institute's white walls, complete with the usual bits of greenery they put everywhere.

Because they actually have green trees, as opposed to the lifeless, leafless, generally much more brittle wood growing on the irradiated surface.

"Feeding them false info was just the obvious choice in that situation while I was there already," you shrug. That's just how it is. "Seems a little weird how you've already abducted and replaced the guy in the power armor, though."

"I believe I need not explain to you how teleportation makes some operations significantly easier by its very nature." Fair point there. "The Institute has, at large, ceased further replacement procedures and interference with the surface's society, but this new threat of an intrusion by the Brotherhood of Steel is significant enough to change this stance."

"Oh, I'm not blaming you. The whole synth doppelganger thing was pretty strange to do on a wide scale, I'll admit, but it does make sense in this context." Seriously, what were they even thinking replacing people left and right?

"I will not pretend what the Institute has been doing is without its own failings, but there is a reason I called all such operations to a stop as soon as a better alternative to improving the lives of people revealed itself."

Suuure. That's what this is about.

"Anyway, any concrete plans on what exactly to do about the Brotherhood? They've apparently got something planned, so…"

"The brain scans taken before disposing of Paladin Danse have revealed that the Brotherhood of Steel is approaching the Commonwealth aboard the Prydwen, an enormous pre-war airship allowing it to move an entire chapter into the Commonwealth."

"… Well fuck, that is kind of an issue." As you understand it, the Commonwealth as an area has too many natural defenses making it simply nigh impossible logistically to move large amounts of troops or materials into or out of it. It's basically insulated from most of the surrounding areas up and down the coast thanks to steep mountains, the Glowing Sea, boggy marshlands and lots of distances that simply make it hard to move around and come in from the west.

All of which is out the window if they have an actual giant airship.


You stay right there in Shaun's office for some time, drawing more details out of him based on the information he has access to. The Prydwen is kind of a big deal, all thing told, and as the premier research institute in this section of the east coast (or, indeed, the east coast as a whole), the Institute does have ways of gathering information about it.

Mostly by way of ripping it out of people's brains, but that's still arguably gentler than what you would've done.

So, taking together everything you know, the Prydwen is chock full of Brotherhood personnel, as in literally thousands or tens of thousands of them just running around inside, with a fleet of vertibirds the fanatics have been using to throw their weight around a bunch. News from other areas than the Commonwealth as such are scarce, but that pretty much sums the situation up.

In other words, once you manage to steal the thing, you're the pretty much only guy with any air superiority to speak of around in this post-apocalypse. Which is actually a damn nice thought.

Now the Brotherhood's leadership, or rather the Elder of this particular chapter (because of course they need to have these pretentious titles and job descriptions for everyone), isn't entirely stupid. They're taking some time and trying to do this whole thing right, for all that Maxson (that's his name) seems to be the kind of guy to always choose direct, violent confrontation in every interaction with anyone or anything outside the Brotherhood all the time.

Meaning they're trying to scout the Commonwealth before sticking their collective dicks into it. Which isn't all that dumb, really. It also means you might just be able to manipulate exactly how quickly the fuckers will actually arrive through the scouting team that is just ridiculously manipulated by several factions at this point.


In the end, though, you don't really want to push things, truth be told. Just let them come as they will, you'll be ready for them regardless.

It's a good talk you have with Shaun, really. Considering his position as your kind of estranged kind of stepson, you do want to actually get along with him, removed from your direct family as he is.

Cupcake seems to have taken to making her robot assistant carry her everywhere. Finally, she is no longer the shortest person in the room by default, though you did make sure to add a programming block so she can't rise above yourself through doing so.


"Hey Jezebel, how have you been?" Your voice is casual and even friendly, betraying none of what you're planning to (finally) do to this bitchy brain in a jar now that you have a bit of time and nothing immediately pressing to distract yourself.

"I had hoped I would not need to deal with your presence or attention for a few more centuries, but disappointment is the natural-"

"Yes, yes, you have a lot of words to say that say very little." You didn't keep her around for her conversational skills, that's for sure. "I wanted to upgrade your body a little, so would you mind coming over to my lab for a bit?"

"I have precious little choice in the matter." Ah, the good old 'has to follow any and all agreements made' clause. The joys of weird programming choices some people made two-hundred years ago for fuck-knows-what reasons, only for you to abuse them now.

Hence Jezebel actually has to obey you now. And you sure are going to ensure this karen of a robot has some productive use in your employ!

The first thing you do once you're inside your work space is, naturally, to turn off the voice functions of the headpiece containing Jezebel's human brain, followed by the camera used to allow her sight of a sort. Disconnecting everything cleanly, you nod at the impotent organ submerged in the clear green gel keeping it preserved and alive.

This will do.

Now then, you quickly get right down to putting the finishing touches on the new body you put together ahead of time, this particular kind of engineering not exactly your greatest strength and there requiring additional care; it is not every day that you basically rip off a literal artificial intelligence's designs, after all.

The fleshy bits, flash-grown with ADAM, need to be controlled for any malignant growths and unfitting connections to the mechanical parts they are to function in conjunction with. This is not a combat model exactly, though it is quite durable and capable of flight thanks to Lutece Particle integration, as is your wont at this point.

The head is of particular importance, then, meant to house Jezebel's most integral parts and replace the pleasingly modular, but also generally quite clunky life support and sensory package your subject came with natively. The operation is swift, if fraught with danger, finally letting you settle your subcontracted minion inside a new, better, home.

It's still a bit large, but it's also extremely well-armored and even better at keeping Jezebel's brain intact than the typical robobrain head. As an added bonus, you went ahead and fiddled with the speech generator, making her sound generally the same as before except with a higher voice.

There's actually quite a lot of intricate engineering going into parts of this thing to make it work and respond just how a human body would, though the sensitivity of the faux-nerves used in the limbs and neck is much lower than the real thing in the biologically grown core body. And it wouldn't work at all like this if you didn't have an actual nerve system to jack them into.

They're more just simulated responses, really, but hey, if it works, it works.

You can't wait for her reaction even as you click the controls cleverly hidden underneath a small panel at the back of her head to 'on'.

"What have you done to me?!"

You grin, knowing Jezebel can see you through the black-tinted visor now. "I made you better. Or should I say, fuckable."

Protectively holding her new, intuitively functioning arms over her privates, Jezebel yells as best she can (you also did install a maximum volume, after all). "I am naked and you are henceforth a known sex offender."

"Eh, sex is rarely offensive in my experience. Believe me, I've tried, and you aren't really naked, your brain is hidden behind the glass." But jokes aside, you really do need to get down to testing the features. "You should be able to feel a set of switches of sorts somewhere in there that allows you to fly by way of redefining your elevation. Can you try?"

Jezebel 'hops' several feet off the ground. "If only I could blast through the ceiling and-"

"Save your futile escape fantasies, I'm not done yet." Stepping closer, you roughly push her hands away, letting your fingers glide over the exposed flesh you endowed Jezebel with.

She shivers, twitching in place, until your questing digits come upon her legs where they shift into metal instead of soft skin, pushing them apart. When you poke her pussy, wondering about whether you got it grown right, she hunches up, her voice replicator picking up stuttering bits and pieces. "Aa- ha- hu- hi-"

"Oh, did you like that?" You ask, pressing forward to pinch her clit between the tips of your fingers.

"Hiiiiii! Stop!"

"What if I don't want to?" One arm goes around her waist to hold her in place, the other continues to stimulate her to test for her reactions. "You're my new model of spatially adjustable sex toy with Lutece Particle devices in both thighs and arms, I'll use you as much as I feel like."

"Mercy! Mercy! It is too much!"

"And here," you whisper against her 'helmet', "I haven't even started railing you against thin air yet."


Jezebel still has to follow your orders, so it is simplicity itself to have her float in front of yourself, short stature turned entirely unproblematic thanks to the inbuilt hovering systems you put into her body for just this very purpose.

Bending her over, you nod appreciatively at the sight of her butt pointing at you. "This is demeaning and offensive."

"Really, I just think it's kinky." And it is, soft, pale flesh being presented to you like this is one of those things that just make you happy. Groping her buttcheeks, you spread them apart, observing her pink rosebud and the sensitive lips of her vagina. "I do hope I got these just right, but that's what testing is for."

She shivers under your touch, but it is only when you unzip your pants as she looks backwards that Jezebel's electronic voice answers. "Your depravity knows no bounds and I want you to know I consider this an act of abuse of our working relationship."

"You'd be a lot more convincing if you weren't a giant bitch to begin with." Your cock freed, you grin down at your pliant robot slave. Or cyborg, really, depending on how you look at it, you suppose.

"You cannot possibly expect to fit that thing inside m-" You ignore what she's saying, instead grabbing her hips as you spread her pussy wide open with a good push of your cock, steadily pulling her onto it more than you thrust it forward. "E-E-E-eh aaaaaa."

"Tight, but flexible," you note without pausing, "just like it's supposed to be."

Project Sexbot can be counted as a success so far, you'd say.

"Too-o-o bi-i-ig!" Jezebel's voice synthesizer is doing the thing again. "Why is-is-is your penis-is-is so-o-o large?"

"Weird way to compliment my size, but I've heard weirder." With a last good tug, you penetrate Jezebel's new partially organic body completely, your whole length contained inside her synthetically grown snatch and poking against the rigid entrance to her womb.

"AaaAaaAaa-"

Maybe you made this thing too sensitive, just a smidgen. Then again, it's doing its job, convulsing and rippling around you pleasurably.

"TooOo much! Too goOoOod!"

You fuck her hard and fast, using Jezebel just like what she is; a tool for your pleasure, a toy for you to use whenever you feel like it. One hand on her hip, the other one on a shoulder, you keep her from flopping around too much as you ravage her technically virgin pussy, not that you bothered to program a hymen into the ADAM when you set it to growing the body parts you used as a base for this robot.

It doesn't take you long like this to feel yourself coming, so you do just that, nutting inside of Jezebel without delay. She convulses a little more, her mechanical limbs stretching into random directions for a long moment, then she lies still in the air, hanging in place even once you pull out and let your seed dribble out of her and between her thighs, 'naturally' elastic pussy almost immediately squeezing back down to let as little as possible escape until she actually cleans herself.

"You okay in there?" You just receive static as an answer to your query, so you tilt your head, wondering if the voicebox attached to her brain broke somehow. This is the exact kind of thing you need to rigorously test your inventions for.

Then you reconsider. Maybe it'll fix itself with a good smack?

The body floating in the air jolts when you slap Jezebel's ass, white skin quickly turning red at the point of impact. "-uUuUuUuuu!"

"Oh, you with me again?"

"Your disgusting degenerate lust for the female form has caused you to create an entirely new biomechanical body with the express purpose of sticking your genitals into it. If it were not for its disgusting, fleshy nature, your drive would be commendable."

You don't mind letting her get a word in edgewise- you aren't done yet. That said… "You seemed to be enjoying yourself just fine, weren't you?"

"I refuse to answer the question."

"That's alright." You spread her open again, this time with another goal in mind.

"Wait, that is the wrong orifiAAAAAAH!"

Further testing brings you some much-needed results. The ass you gave Jezebel is just as tight as you expected and, more importantly, just as sensitive as the rest of her body, driving her wild and incoherent with pleasure within moments.

To be expected, as her body was literally made for sex, but it's nice to know you did it right.

What's more, you actually thought to test by feeling around her stomach and you do, in fact, make a bulge in her when you really get to fucking her, which is neat. About what you wanted the end result to look like and also aesthetically pleasing in general.

Yet another plus point for Project Sexbot. The sheer breadth of applications should you choose to mass-produce these in any capacity…


Uyehara Yoshiaki slammed a fist down onto the disinfected laboratory desk, grinding his teeth. "He did it again. The madman did it again."

Nolac, the gender- and identity-confused soul he had to deal with, hung themselves over his shoulder, looking at what Gabriel was doing on his screen (and pushing a chest he was not ready to deal with at the moment against his shoulder). "What's got you in a tizzy again? The robot bitch?"

"… He made a sex robot. Again. Making robots that are just like humans was my big dream back in my first live and he just keeps on stumbling onto everything he needs to make them all over the place."

"What, you sulking? Seriously" Nolac grinned while Uyehara turned his eyes away.

"So what if I am? I-"

He felt a pair of lips on his cheek, freezing him in place. "You know if all you wanted was someone as good as the real thing, the real thing's all around you, yeah?" Nolac whispered into his ear, gently blowing into it.

"… I'm back from getting food, there's muffins today," Indigo's voice came from behind him, making Uyehara stiffen and panic on the spot.

"Wait, Indigo-san, I can explai-"

He tried to turn around, Nolac (perhaps deliberately?) got in the way, they tumbled to the ground and all of a sudden he was holding onto something soft and warm. "Ahn! Not so rough, Yoshi-san~!"

Indigo-san's expression, a bright, happy smile, was terrifying. Julianne opened a door on the opposite side of the room, blinking at the scene before her.

"Should've brought some popcorn."


"I must say, sir, you certainly have outdone yourself this time," Codsworth says as he tries out his new body. "This is entirely extraordinary."

"Glad you like it. Uh, make sure the cloth doesn't catch anywhere? You know how mechanical limbs can be."

"Certainly, certainly. I must say, this outfit you found for me is most dapper, I'm almost embarrassed to wear it."

You haven't exactly been following Nora's every step, but she did mention a while ago she's recently been reminded just how close and loyal Codsworth has been to her and her family for over two hundreds years by this point, leading you to the question of where you stand in regards to the robotic quasi-butler.

Well, he's good as family to Nora and she's family to you, so the first thing you did once you had a little time and could grab him was to ask him if he'd like to have his internals transplanted into a new body better suited to taking care of your family.

He couldn't agree quickly enough and, well, here you are.

"I would never have thought the day would come for me to be this humanoid, but I believe I shall be making great use of it now that it has. Thank you, sir, from the very depths of my circuit boards."

"No need, I am doing this to make you better at what I want you to after all." And you aren't going to pretend otherwise, because why bother?

"Well, sir, what I want to do has just become significantly easier, so I shall have you accept my gratitude still." And he's still on this, isn't he?"

"Suit yourself, then," you shrug, "though you haven't even heard the best part yet. Notice how your whole body is oddly light?"

"Now that you mention it, I suppose so, sir. It is not immediately evident for a robot to feel, but I did notice a certain lightness with which I am moving," the now fully-fledged robot butler nods courteously.

"I've deliberately kept your new body as light as I could without compromising the important functions." No use dancing around the matter. "About as heavy as a human being your size would be, in fact. Which is rather handy should someone wish to smuggle you around through magical means inside their shadow, which are subject to mass limitations specifically."

"… Sir, are you saying that…?"

"Yeah, if you want to, you can come along inside someone's shadow, you're sturdy enough to take on the quasi-vacuum inside and light enough it shouldn't be too much trouble. Would be a poor caretaker that can't take care of Nora's kids as soon as they're in another dimension, right?"

"… Sir, I do not know how to say this appropriately, so I shan't try and fail to do so with any flowery language." Codsworth bows politely, bending at the waist and all just like his body's been programmed. "Thank you."

"Yes, yes," you wave him off. "You go and bring Nora the happy news while I clean up here, will you? I really need to work on keeping my workspace organized while I'm busy…"


You stare at the green-ish, perfectly round, smooth object you are trying to investigate.

Your distorted reflection stares back.

Right, you won't get much just looking normally, for all that your usual senses are normally everything you need.

"Reveal past and future!" You close your eyes, delving into the past and perhaps a few flashes of the future of this green pearl thingy.

… Most of what you're seeing inside the former is just a giant clam, oddly animate, drifting this way and that. It is actively opening and closing to catch water currents and move itself around, repeatedly preying on mirelurks and other ocean animals by snapping shut around them whenever it can catch them.

It is also, oddly, in seemingly completely clear water, sunshine coming through despite this thing being at the bottom of the extremely murky ocean. Something is being fucky here with either the past or your vision of it.

Eventually, the clam got more or less stuck in relative proximity to Boston, where Taylor ultimately found and pried it open using a group of mirelurks she was controlling using their pincers in unison. Ironic, but not extremely surprising nor helping you figure this thing out.

Glimpsing into its future, you quickly hit the limits of a relatively uncertain future. Which, again, is ironic; the universe is being more or less deterministic, as far as you can tell, except where beings that disobey or entirely ignore the laws of physics throw a wrench into things. Which you, yourself, constitute, though your magic seems predisposed towards working around this and delivering you reasonably certain results anyway through a plethora of means, not the least of which is it just estimating what you're going to do under given circumstances and going from there.

Which is how it basically already works in general, but anyway.

You see yourself keeping this pearl, it lying around inside your storage, several things being taken in and out around it (why would- oh, that's just Geoff, too many reasons he would need mini-nukes)… Honestly, you don't see yourself doing much with this thing as it is.

Perhaps it is time to get the artillery of information gathering, even if it would be kind of a waste.


Alright then, what question should you ask? The idea that you're somehow being a karen at reality and just asking with so much conviction you're owed an answer aside, you only get one of these per week, so you really have to make them count.

… Then again, perhaps simple works best in this case. It is a fairly simple thing you want to find out, in any case, so… best to just go for it.

"What does this pearl held in my hand do?"

The onrushing thoughts and pure information are familiar by now, but you still do need to take a moment to work your way through them.

That said, it's not super much, as this particular spell tends to work out. Just a short combination of concepts that can easily be translated into a single, simple sentence.

Reflect and sustain a disguise of the truth.

That's… not super much to go on with. So it's hiding something or it's a measure of keeping something hidden or…

Wait a second, you have a whole thing about manipulating how thing seem as opposed to what they are through your magic. Could it be?

"What exists and what doesn't!" You create an illusion of yourself in the room alongside your actual self, just standing there statically. Except you don't cast it where you put it and instead on the pearl inside your hand.

You can see the light reflecting inside its surface morph and just like that, you can see a copy of yourself in it… and where you tried to indirectly put it.

You move the pearl. The illusion you created moves along with it, staying in the same relative position until it hits a wall and dissipitates.

… Well now.

Identified: Pearl Of Muddled Waters

A semi-magical, giant green pearl that, through a quirk of Earth Fallout's whole thing, has gained the metaphysical quality of reflecting illusions and falsifying perception of itself through magical (read, not directly physical) means in minor ways. Any Illusion Magic spells cast upon it that do not require a concrete target will be independently sustained by it until they are compromised or replaced with a new spell.


"Gggbh, gkh…"

You frown, considering your abnormal rate of progress. Could it really be that sex is just this impactful on your learning speed? Normally, you'd expect the opposite t be true, it being a distraction of sorts, but come to think of it, you did learn a lot of stuff very rapidly back in high school whenever you did 'study' groups with the girls that were interested in them.

"Guuuuuuuh!"

You come inside Jezebel again, completing yet another hour of endurance testing for her new body. She's got a veritable belly bulge from all the spunk you've deposited inside of her, spilling a few drops at most every time you seed her.

You did a surprisingly good job in genetically engineering her biological parts. Perhaps you should look into mass-producing robots like this and just, like, use them to run a brothel? This body looks reasonably close to a human and with just a bit of engineering, you could just house some basic processing inside the helmet instead of a human brain.

They could even become pregnant and take part in increasing your civilian population base over the long term. Likely something to look into more in case you end up hibernating on Earth Fallout for extended periods of time, but yeah.

"Mer… Cy…"

"I'm off to practice for half an hour, then we're going another couple rounds," you announce as you leave. Finding the perfect balance between working out and banging Jezebel's brains out hard enough she goes insensate is taking a little doing, but you're confident you can get closer to that golden ratio at least.

Incremental progress. It's important.

However, just before you arrive back in the empty room you're using to turn into a gas uninterrupted, you find that a certain naked pregnant vampire has decided to wait for you inside. "Hello, Gabriel… Do you have a few minutes? I think my state is making me hornier than usual."

… Well, you know how to help your wives about life-threatening issues like this. "For you, Nora? Always."


Not all of your day is fun and games, however. You also have a bit of actual, you hesitate to call it work, to do; though you're being plenty productive, most of your productivity is tied up in satisfying the needs of the women you brought to Earth Fallout with you this time around and cataloguing the old stuff down in Vault 111 in preparation of its big retrofitting as a more permanent facility for your prisoners and any vampires that want to hang out free of the sun.

Plus important research, everything else you'd prefer to keep somewhat hidden, a place to store Cupcake's experiments in relative security… The magical super steroids are too lethal to last long, otherwise that one raider would have totally escaped Sanctuary, for one.

Interestingly, most of the technology down here is actually mildly useful to yourself- had the facility not been sabotaged and power been cut off, the cryopods would still be containing perfectly intact and alive human beings after over 200 years, just like Nora made it through just fine.

What's more, you actually remembered the one 'cryo-gun' the vault's overseer seemed to be working on from all the way back when you and Nora made your way out of this place together. The lock, while high-tech for something from the fifties or sixties, maybe, doesn't present much of a challenge for you.

Turns out it's actually functional. Needs some liquid nitrogen loaded into these cartridges as ammunition, but is very good at aggressively freezing things you shoot with it.

You'll add it to your backlog of stuff to take apart and analyze later.

As for the rest… Well, Vault 111 isn't horribly big or anything, as its 'inhabitants' didn't need much space beyond their pods, but the infrastructure of machines and space for the Vault-Tec personnel supposed to be present do give you something to work with, just as soon as you take everything cluttering the place apart.

Which you do, mostly. Two pieces of everything are kept intact for your own purposes, the rest you have your robots and undead take apart and recycle right away. Logistics are a bit of an issue still, but you use those same minions to dig out a couple caves near the elevator, outside the vault itself, to store the materials you're getting this way temporarily and move incoming traffic towards.

It's essentially an improvised depot, but it works, as they have a tendency to. Now, as for the things you're having your small army of menacingly hovering Bobs install instead…


Honestly, for how little time you have to work with, you're actually pretty proud of how the new and improved Vault 111 came out. You did kind of capitalize on the preexisting features the location offered you, just… improved on them a bunch to store more people with relative ease.

Incidentally, while you don't have cryogenics in here, that didn't exactly stop you from just cramming the still conscious scum you have access to into pods.

They come pre-installed with a couple needles to drain the blood, a steady drip of stimulants to keep their bodies more or less intact and healthy and, of course, little enough room they can't really move or try to kill themsleves.

The perfect fit for all your needs, in other words.

And just for the sake of variety, the laboratory sections of this new vault setup containing the test subjects you may actually take out of their pods have tubes instead (they make transport a bit easier due to certain… design choices you made), with a bit of greenery as a result of leaving Nolac alone with their new big project aside from giving Taylor more horrible bugs to play with growing out of the massive steel you had your robots construct everything with.

You then just threw a couple of your material replicating resource undead in there, too, for good measure. If you have this ambience and theme, you're damn well going to run with it.

All in all, Vault 111 is now up and running again, open for any and all prisoners that wish to forever lose their minds. For a variety of reasons. The advantages of being a 'nation' that doesn't acknowledge human rights is that you don't have to even pretend there's any chance anyone interred in here will ever be in any state to reintegrate into society of any sort.

Or remotely sane. Or even physically intact in the long term. Or…

Well, you get the picture.


Okay, prisoners and laboratories are migrated, you have a hundred or so BATs scanning Lexington (or at least what's left of the city), so you should have a decent overview of that soon-ish… What else can you get done right now?

"Sir, do you require any refreshments? You have been hard at work for hours now."

Codsworth, bearing a teapot filled with blood. Somehow, the robot butler is a very welcome sight.

"Oh, I sometimes keep at it for days. Thanks for the drink, though- sometimes I completely forget I even need to sustain myself at all for a while." Accepting the teacup, you hum appreciatively at the temperature- cooled blood is a very, very acquired taste for you, so having something at about body temperature you didn't even need to warm up yourself is a godsent.

Yourself-sent? One of these days you'll figure out how to re-contextualize language for the extremely megalomaniac, as in, yourself.

"Perhaps I should keep a closer watch on such behaviour in the future, then. Will you need anything else for now, sir?"

… Actually… You take a closer look at Codsworth, the inside of your inner world growing active as the observatories scatted all over it churn with activity despite their emptiness. All of them, without exception, point their instruments right at the robot standing before you.

"One thing, in fact. Did you know you have a soul, Codsworth?" It is diffuse and hard to make out details, but you're pretty sure that's just because your soul sight isn't really meant for finer perception like that.

"I I have never been one to consider philosophical concerns like this, but thank you, sir."

"No, I mean literally. Here, let me weaponize it for you really quick."

And just like that, Codsworth gained use of the mysterious soul emanation juice that is aura. No, you shall refuse to go deeper into how it works for you have no idea how exactly.

It just works. That has to be enough sometimes.


You sit down in the newly built room inside the newly built building, having decided that you need a mild veneer of professionalism if you're going to con all the locals into seeing you as an authority on whatever you need them for.

Being a good leader, you know from experience, is about ninety percent purely looking like you have things under control. Luckily for you, you're pretty good at that and the cosmic powers and literal armies of robots don't hurt, either.

Hence you're making it a point to arrive first, then send out the summons for the gathering you want, greeting everyone as they trickle in one by one. Kate, Nora, Taylor, Cupcake, Isabel and Preston are all invited and do indeed arrive, filling up the command room with the extra comfy chairs you had your robots throw together, attended by Codsworth who is standing by with refreshments.

"Hello everyone, glad you could make it on such short notice. I have asked all of you here right now to come so I can inform you about a grave threat approaching the Commonwealth as we speak."

"How serious are we actually talking?" Kate asks with her feet resting on the table. You'll need to have it wiped later, the ground in this dimension itself has to be some kind of hazardous.

"A mild to serious inconvenience," you qualify drolly. "The Brotherhood of Steel is sending one of its 'chapters' here to investigate the Institute on a giant airship. They're liable to come after the Minutemen first due to the actual technology we're showing off on a large scale."

Preston clears his throat, straightening his back. "What do we do about them?"


The problem, as such, is fairly simple once you get down to brass tacks, to use language that seems oddly well-suited to this whole situation. The Prydwen as such isn't any real problem given your personal capabilities, nor is the sheer number of members the Brotherhood of Steel will be shipping in, when you look at it that way.

The real issue is that when the Brotherhood arrives, it will likely be having its fleet of vertibirds, essentially armored helicopters in practice if not in theory, be disgorging its people all over the place. You don't know which direction the Prydwen will be flying in from and while you could go and establish an outer perimeter of the Commonwealth in the time you expect to have, doing so would be kind of a pain and take up valuable resources you want to put elsewhere, so while you can likely shut this effort down quickly, there'll still be a fleet of air-capable assholes to deal with for everyone else while you're busy.

So that's what most of your planning session ends up revolving around: How do you take out something like that with the means available to you?

Turns out there's quite a few possible answers, all told. Kate is essentially a walking emplacement of heavy artillery, Nora is confident she can navigate aerial battles like this one and Taylor's power should, in theory, allow her to go and fill any flying structures with copious amounts of bugs, though depending on elevation that might be more or less truly feasible.

You've already been constructing a decently large army of robots, some of which can fly, which makes some of this whole arrangement a lot easier… Though material requirements for large amounts of Lutece Particles continue to be a bottleneck on how many of your mechanical and expendable soldiers you can have rise into the sky to meet these enemies.

The rest will just have to shoot up at them. Volume of fire wins out when you don't have to care about the losses you take.

On that note, however, it turns out Preston also has something to say. And hey, say what you want, but you're always in favor of constructive participation in meetings like this.

"Back in the day, before I was even part of them, the Minutemen had these artillery emplacements, really small ones a single person could use," he explains with a few gestures. "Last I knew, we're still working on the Castle's outsides and surface facilities, but I'd bet there's blueprints somewhere deeper inside. Most of the old armory has been blocked off and the blast doors are closed, so nobody's been in there to look for… a while."

Huh. Well, you could probably draft up something of the sort yourself easily enough, but it would probably be interesting to see how people here would have approached something like that… And used their own primitive means to build and, more importantly, supplied ammunition to miniature artillery.

Why reinvent the wheel when you can just improve it instead?

Then, last but not least, you have the topic of Hack. Hack who, in all honesty, is a hard counter to any enemy reliant on technology and strict organization. Only hindrance to simply making the Brotherhood fall in on itself is the amount of aura you'd need to sustain a couple hundred bodies for the personality construct you have confined to the parts of your inner world that don't break easily right now.

Things in there fix themselves automatically. That didn't stop her from taking apart the lab to try and build a giant death toaster. It didn't work, but you still had to wait half a day for your lab to fix itself again.


"Just do what you did here and it'll be alright. I don't need to tell you how careful you have to be about who you do it to, but just use your best judgement, okay?"

"I don't know what to say, but… Thank you, Gabriel. Not everyone would trust me with something like this."

You wave Preston off, largely uninterested. "Eh, I do trust you not to mess this up. Too badly, anyway."

And if he ends up accidentally spreading aura around down the line, it's not like you can't just work with it, anyway. Earth Fallout is enough of a shitfest the introduction of aura wouldn't make it noticeably worse as far as you're concerned, anyway.


It costs just as much, if not even more, materials to create as the normal model- rare metals in particular, which aren't excatly in abundance in this dimension, though scavenging lets you keep up with your needs more or less. Stuffed full of weaponry and quite modular in construction, this beauty bears enough firepower to level… pretty much everything you'd point it at, really.

And how is all of this possible? What miraculous technology enable this flying machine to do these things? Well, the Lutece Particles allow for stable and just about perfectly controlled flight, but the real power source for the laser cannon and assorted dispensers of ionized matter, not to mention the rail guns meant to punch straight through anything in the way, are none other than one hundred fusion cores distributed throughout each design.

"You know, Yoshi, I'm proud of what we came up with together. I really am." You pat the soul's shoulder, having called upon him to help you along on the design front.

"Why are you even doing this? It's torture, plain and simple. A single stray shot igniting one of them could blow up the whole thing. Is this why we're here? Just to suffer?!"

You grin. "Come on, 'buddy', what could be better than lots and lot of…"

"Fusion Cores?"

Practicing those little stage magic tricks finally came in handy.


"So there's no expansion going on right now?"

"Yeah. We have people reaching out to settlements as far as Malden, but right now I figured we shouldn't stretch our people too far until the danger is… dealt with."

"Mhm, makes sense. Ah well, guess that can wait until afterwards then."


Note to self, create a few robots to clean up after the experiments inside the vault. Nolac's latest attempt to work with Taylor nearly went out of control and completely covered two biolabs with a thin layer of silk


As the sun rises over the sea off in the horizon, you stand in the courtyard of the Castle, or Fort Independence to use the original name (and really, the founders of America weren't that original when they named stuff in the first place).

"Here are the blast doors that have kept pretty much everything out until today. Best we can guess is that they were closed when the Castle was originally attacked by supermutants to keep any of them from getting at the ordinance inside."

Preston could make a decent enough tour guide if he put his mind to it, couldn't he?

"The biggest issue is just how massive the steel is. We tried using the ion guns, but they were too likely to just eat through the walls themselves, too, and causing another cave-in is the last thing we want. Any ideas how we can open it without just taking half the Castle apart?"

"A couple, but let me try the simple solution first. Step aside." You have always been a proponent of automation and delegation first and above all else- if you personally did everything you could do, you'd never have the time to actually enjoy yourself or seek out self-improvement. That said, when you can just do something like this real quick…

You extend your claws, wicked long talons of a silver-grey material that isn't quite like metal, the morphologic effect reaching up beneath your clothes and up to your elbows where it terminates in a short, wicked spike. This isn't the full extent you can push it for, just enough you won't scratch yourself up too badly now.

Natural protection, insofar as any part of you is natural.

Gripping the edge of the large, five meter tall solid plate of steel, you give it a good flex, pushing your feet against the ground and increasing the force at which you pull. "Gabriel, you can't be…"

You ignore Preston. You have a date with this door's insides.

Pulling harder and harder, your muscles are actually pushed for once, not that they really produce all that much force here. It takes a moment, as you don't want to accidentally tear down half the Castle as Preston feared, but finally, you hear the pleasing squeal of metal forced to bend.

Then break.

And then, finally, in a dusty splintering of breaking stone and mortar, you have half the door off from where it was lying.

"See, easy," you tell your companion, the rest of the courtyard falling into silence at your display of strength. But hey, if it motivates the minions, you're all for it. "Now let's see what's inside."


The armory is, to put it mildly, laden with history. For one, the first thing you find once you get inside and wave the dusty air out of your face is a skeletal dead body clutching an empty wine bottle.

This dead man quickly turns out to be one General McGann, who left a record of how he was stuck in place early during the battle during which the Castle fell and the tunnel to his quarters collapsed, leading to a long wait for reinforcements while he kept watch over the massive amounts of weaponry, ammunition, explosives and similar stored inside.

Only for none to come and him eventually giving up after a couple days and just drinking some wine he also found to make it easier.

"He was before my time, but… He was a good man. I'll have a funeral arranged later."

And that's that.

Oh, did you also mention the sheer amount of weaponry, ammunition and explosives inside the armory?

"Goes to show just how big of a deal the Minutemen used to be. And how they went under once communications and their weapons stockpile were… unavailable," you say.

"And now they're both back, with interest. Feels weird to really see how much of a legacy we have to live up to," Preston responds, adjusting his cowboy hat.

"I'm sure you'll do just fine. You always have- wait a second."

There's movement in the dark ahead. However, you're fairly sure of your own superiority to pretty much anything in this dimension, so you forge on, Preston trailing behind you through the sudden tense silence hanging in the air.

Turns out it's just a sentry bot, though. "Intruders detected. Eliminating."

They had a sentry bot guarding this place? "Hold up a second, we're with the Minutemen."

"IFF system… inactive. Last maintenance cycle has been completed approximately fifty years ago." The metallic clang of the usual robot voices you're used to from this dimension makes it impossible to tell whether or not this thing has developed any sapience, but a quick look confirms it doesn't have a soul, at least. "Eliminating."


Jim Hardney looked on at the thick security door someone had rigged up so many years ago, torn open as though by an insistent toddler with infinite strength. Or at least that was what it looked like in the aftermath, with the traces of claws in the metal distorted beyond recognition when it was warped into its current position.

Everyone knew General Garvey had a line on all the advanced technology the Minutemen were using and working with through Sanctuary and a certain man had been seen around headquarters a couple of times, not that anyone payed close attention to that as most people were allowed into the ground floors at least. Now Hardney was beginning to get an inkling on who it was that was secluded in Sanctuary, his intuition whispered.

Also why the human test subjects were required. If Hardney was doing whatever it was that let a man, Gabriel if he remembered right, do this to himself… He would be testing it out on others first, too.

Probably. Science had a way of making people go mad far as he knew.

"You think they're coming back out?" He asked the woman next to him, one of the technicians they'd brought in to help operate the communications center, letting them keep all their patrols and task forces coordinated in real time right there.

"I think they're busy fucking."

Jim blinked, the assertion bowling him over.

"Think about it. Why else would they have things like they do? They're secret starstruck lovers, General Preston being the only thing to melt the ice cold man that claimed Sanctuary… Aaah!"

He edged away from the woman in question.

Thankfully, just a few awkward moments during which the female Minuteman grew more alarming, babbling and salivating to herself, later, Hardney could see the two men returning.

"See, told you I had everything under control."

"It was a sentry bot. there's no such thing as control whenever one of them is involved."

"You'd be surprised, I've seen a few that still worked kind of like they were supposed to."

… It couldn't be, right?


With the robot under your control through Hack, you had all the time you needed to take a closer look at the armory's contents, yielding everything you wanted it to and more.

The blueprints for how to assemble the 'artillery' the Minutemen used to deploy in contested areas are enlightening in all the ways you wouldn't expect them to be. They're less blueprints and more a set of instructions meant to let anyone with some minimal training build the things needed to fire a payload out of a cannon.

Everything from a list of what kinds of salvage you need to the common household chemicals, or at least they used to be common before the nukes, required to actually fire something off.

That said, the methods aside, the basic engineering and the diagrams someone drew up at some point are completely sound. It's a simple set of machinery, a cannon, a raised platform with the mechanism to pivot it in place and target it, everything from building to practical usage explained in simple language. A monkey could open fire on a designated position with one of these with only some minimal training, which means that the average human could possibly learn the same (with effort), too.

It's ingenious, less in the engineering itself and more in how it is conveyed so as to not require any specialist attention anywhere along the process of getting artillery pieces up and running. Ensuring your products are intuitive and simple to use is just good practice in general, one you have been paying attention to for every piece of equipment you have designed for mass-production so far, but this is testament to people that went out of their way to ensure as much over all else.

Questionable design choices aside, that alone is worthy of some recognition. Now, some standardized pieces later and you can just mass-produce the exceedingly simple design you have in front of you much easier, but it doesn't even take up any rare materials or anything! Just some careful assembly, but you've automated all of that a long time ago.

If anything, preparing enough ammunition might be the biggest problem. That and the fact these things are meant more for surface-to-surface bombardment instead of surface-to-air, but volume of fire covereth a multitude of sins.

In the meantime, you can just shift a couple of the material replication undead towards getting you the smokeless gunpowder you need to make effective use of this concept.

"Uh, Gabriel? What are we supposed to do with the sentry bot?"

Right, Preston is still there. "Dunno, you can have it repaired later or just recycle it. Not my problem. It'll stay shut down for the time being either way.


The new plans taken and a few simple changes implemented before you send them off to have Isabel prep to create a bunch of them inside your factory, the logistics and manufacturing of everything taken care of by the teleporters and your very own manufactories trivially, you move back to Sanctuary for the time being, knowing that before you get on with any of that you'll need to reinforce your forces in preparation for… well, everything.

Can't ever have enough robots. The more, the better, under any circumstances possible.

So you go ahead and create a bunch of additional material replicators, using the dead bodies you have on hand and any you can get your hands on on the fly- it isn't super much, but Preston does remember the whole animating the bodies of your defeated enemies thing, so you do have a good few dead bodies on top of the people you fed to Taylor and miscellaneous dead bodies lying around.

It's a good first step, anyway. A quick bit of mental math to figure out what, exactly, is going to run out at your current rates of material consumption first, you have a few more bags of flesh churning away at regenerating the pieces you implanted only for them to be pushed out and collected.

Genuinely creating matter from nothing feels as good as ever. Take this, Conservation of Mass, and stick it where the sun don't shine before a vampire does it for you.

You try not to smug at reality itself too much. It is one of the few tasks you fail at anymore.


One part of your progressing preparations for both expanding your direct sphere of influence around the Commonwealth and to ensure your schedule will be cleared whenever the Brotherhood of Steel gets around to being absolutely massacred by you involves clearing the immediate surroundings of your current domain of any particularly notable hazards to keep them from spilling over at the worst possible time.

You do hate being interrupted in the middle of a meal. Always have, probably always will.

Hence here you are, having arranged a little something in the outskirts of Lexington. The ruins of a city filled with ghouls created by the initial nuclear blast somewhere far to the south-west and the scene of several battles and mass-executions at your hand due to the raider presence in some of the more intact buildings, the former city is just a health hazard if anything should manage to rouse a large amount of those same ghouls into action.

It's annoying how the one universal drive of the feral ones seems to be to attack anyone that's not like them, but alas, you shall simply treat the walking dried jerky the way it is meant to be.

In this case, that means you brought a good two dozen Torpids to carry the bodies once you're done and a comparable number of Hammers to help load them up, the humanoid structure of this model serving to make them perfect menial labourers when you aren't having them shoot everything that moves.

… Is this a symptom of your sense of expenses being completely warped through being fucking richer than god in more worlds than you aren't? They are kind of extremely sophisticated killing machines whose material costs alone would be several million dollars apiece on Earth Bet, despite the extreme ease with which you can build massive amounts of them on a whim.

Eh, it's probably fine. Now then, time to get going and try out one of your big transformations you rarely get to play with! Guided by half-baked instinct and the certainty of your powers, you breathe in deeply, taking in more and more air, more than a human would be able to, feeling just a little bloated… And then you breathe out again, exhaling a faint fog that comes and comes and fills up the street around you, your sense of touch growing fainter and fainter until you realize your body has ceased to be entirely.

You are the mist now. Made entirely of gas, your mental capabilities sustained purely by your magical nature.

You push out further and further, your vapor-like form covering torn-up asphalt and brushing through the cracks of what is left of the buildings around you.

That's better. You can pull yourself in close, but it's much more comfortable to spread out, to let your distributed consciousness feel over your surroundings.

Time to have a little fun, as much as primitive degraded humans can produce.


When the Mist came over Lexington, few were near enough to see or notice, not that they would have consciously done so even if they were. Instead, the only beings that would feel any difference were those inside the ruined city, the ghouls left to rot for centuries and the scant few raiders that figured Jared's demise meant the old Corvega plant was a great hideout, slowly accumulating members to become a fully-fledged gang in their own right.

Initially, all the Mist did was to spread, its long, finger-like tendrils almost feeling for any living beings they could find. Once a large area that would once have equated several city blocks was covered in its white, fleeting embrace, however, It began.

Ghouls that laid dormant for centuries stirred, roused by the sounds of living people- that weren't baked by radiation from the inside out. The laughter of children, voices, shoes clattering against the ground… Enough to alarm them as to the presence of someone that was not there, making them get up and investigate.

Their primitive brains simply weren't capable of figuring out it was just a trick.

Then, as they crawled out from beneath collapsed rubble and car wrecks, came from dilapidated buildings and up from the sewers, they gathered into large mobs, swarms of ghouls accumulating as each and every one of them saw and heard figures in the mist luring them further and further.

Then they met. Two large groups, hordes of dozens or even hundreds of ghouls, all over the Mist, and all of a sudden what they saw was not other ghouls, but rather the smooth skins and excited shouting of humans.

They threw themselves at each other without a second thought, turning the city of Lexington into a bloodbathed arena of epic proportions. They clawed, bit, tackled, threw each other and themselves off buildings and dogpiled whichever of them was 'isolated'.

The raiders, just a dozen or so of them at the time, fared little better. The Corvega Assembly Plant was turned into a charnel house of confusion and the widespread intoxication among them due to jet, psycho and more just made them easier targets than even the simplistic minds of feral ghouls.

And throughout it all, the Mist continued to spread, intent on leaving none alive. One of the most interesting finds, of course, was what would later be identified as a supermutant behemoth, a large, hulking testament to the efficacy of FEV left to affect a host for extended periods of time. A green monster the size of a building and much more aggressive, it was a prime candidate to be brought down by the ghouls surrounding it, lest it caused more destruction than necessary at the time.

It still demolished several buildings before it finally died to the mist turning into innumerable hooked blades inside its lungs, but the collateral damage was acceptable enough. Lexington was a heap of trash anyway.

The Mist continued on, sweeping up the entirety of the area in a storm of violence. The last of the raiders were hiding and shivering when they died, letters and shapes formed in painful cuts along their skins, and Lexington grew quiet once more.


Once you're shrunk back down to your normal size and mentality, you take a moment to shake your head clear of the expanded point of view you just subjected yourself to before you proceed to have your robots loot everything not nailed down around Lexington (and quite some things that are). The bodies are the first and most important part of that, of course, as you do quite need as much biomass as you can get your hands on for the sheer convenience alone, but a lot of wrecked cars, home appliances and similar are also being grabbed and thrown into the Torpid robots en masse.

The advantages of easily available teleportation do mean you can just keep on cycling them around- which you do, too, because man, this is a lot of potentially useful junk. And you haven't even started on the assembly plant dominating what's left of Lexington's skyline… You might be on this for a couple hours.

Perhaps you'll go and request some reinforcements, even. Jut to make this whole gig go faster. Or…

You look at the dead bodies. The joys of magic; you can always just make yourself a couple pairs of helping hands. If they're lucky, they may even be attached to different bodies…


Telepathy is a powerful and wonderful tool. Certainly one of the better ones inside your arsenal, not the least of reasons being you can stay in contact with your loved ones through it at all times (presuming they're in the same dimension at the time).

What it is not, however, is a replacement of personally meeting with the people you're close to. It's just not quite the same, for all that purely mental intimacy is its own kind of deep and unfathomable and not something you could imagine going without by now. Hence, you're currently having everyone gather at your home right now.

"I have been working way too much lately," you announce with an absurdly straight face at the gathered vampires and thralls- Kate, Nora, Taylor, Cupcake and Isabel, pretty much just everyone you took to this dimension with you. "I require relaxation and attention."

Kate bursts out laughing immediately, coming over to stretch a hand up to pat your head. "Aww, is our poor stud lonely?"

"So what if I am? You know how I get when I'm neglected."

"And no Sarah around to watch out for that, hm?" Nora joins Kate on your opposite side from her. "Guess we'll have to do her part, won't we?"

Two pairs of breasts are pressing against you. Slowly, but surely, your mindset is shifting from doing endless work to making endless love.

Progress!


Taylor wiggled a little, held in place by the arms around her while another pair was stripping her naked, one layer of clothing after the next removed in-between the hot, heavy whispers against her skin exhaled by the two people touching her.

She was glad she was wearing her hair in a big braid tonight, it would have gotten everywhere if she wasn't.

"Perfect smooth skin," the female voice said, though Taylor wasn't looking at Kate. She was keeping her eyes closed in a mix of trepidation and that feeling when you were a kid during Christmas and didn't want to spoil the presents. "Vampires have it so easy with this stuff."

"Got a little curvier, too," the male voice coming from behind her joined in. Gabriel was sliding his hands along her sides, his sure hands leaving to inch of her unfelt. "Not too much, though. Just enough, right?"

Taylor breathed out heavily. "I always wanted to be a little more like that." Like her mom, she left unsaid.

She felt a pair of soft lips on her cheek. "Tell you a little secret. You look damn tasty, girl."

"You really do." She was being kissed from both sides by people that were way too… attractive, hot, sexy, pretty, whichever applied, while she lost her pants, the simple garment sliding to the floor.

And Taylor loved every second of it.

They kept on a little longer, playing with and talking at her. It felt weird, but nice, being reduced to the passive part in all of this, letting them use her however they wanted. She could see how and why something like this required so much trust normally.

If everyone involved wanted to do things consensually, anyway. That was an important distinction.

Before long, Taylor was naked, wearing nothing but her glasses and a few of the armbands made of silk she'd been experimenting with… And the bright pink buttplug Kate had gotten her. Likely created with Gabriel's machines like everything else was around Sanctuary.

Had to keep up the training, after all. All of it.

The gorgeous tattooed woman was crouching in front of her, arms around her waist, and looking up at Gabriel as she slowly spread Taylor's butt, giving him a perfect view of her stuffed asshole. It felt strangely pleasant in its humiliation, just an extension of what they were doing anyway.

"Looks good, don't she? We've been training her for a long while."

"She does." They were talking like she wasn't even there, but Taylor knew that if she was uncomfortable, both Gabriel and Kate would immediately stop. It was freeing. "Guess what we do with girls like you, Taylor?"

"I don't know," she said before he even thought about it.

A hand was on her plug now, putting just a little bit of pressure on it and making her feel the movement all the way halfway through her body. "Guess."

"… You throw them on a bed and fuck their asses raw?"

It was her best guess. Nobody could prove other wise.

"Mhm, that does sound about right," Kate agreed. She could almost see it, the hungry, lascivious grin, the sparkling green eyes…

Gabriel tugged on her plug, pulling at it slowly and deliciously- she was panting despite not actually needing to breathe. "Can't be helped, then, if that's what we do," Gabriel murmured and begun nibbling on her ear.

Her very, very sensitive ear. Taylor moaned loud enough if there were still unrelated humans living around them, they'd have heard it all the way outside the house.

She didn't remember much of how she got thrown onto a pure white bed, her ass empty of any intruders for the first time in what felt like months. She was looking backwards, pushing her butt up and wiggling it to entice Gabriel.

Her face was hot, but she'd been waiting for this for so long.

"Cute." He reached over, not a thread on him himself, and joined her on the soft covers, something big and hard coming to rest on top of her butt, pulsing softly, while a hand brushed through her hair. "You're very cute and I think we need to tell you more often."

"Is now really the time?" Taylor asked, knowing she was blushing like a virgin. Worse, even.

"It's always the time."

And like that, he reared back, his big fat penis pushing against her asshole. She made a choked sound when it sank in without resistance, fingers clawing into white cloth, and she finally got to find out how the real thing felt compared to everything Sarah and Kate had inserted into Taylor in preparation for this moment.

She could feel Gabriel sodomizing her in agonizing shocks of pleasure, her butt swallowing his rod inch by inch as it spread open to welcome him. "Someone's enjoying themselves, huh?"

All of a sudden, she had a pair of arms hooked over her shoulders, drawing her back until Taylor was kneeling upright, the vampire that had turned her slowly moving inside of her. "Could always be more, though!"

Like that Kate joined in again, tweaking her clit and fingering her without any more foreplay; Taylor was soaked already anyway. Making out with the woman who'd taught her how to hold and use a gun, how to walk and how to talk to shut down anyone that was doubting her, including herself, she felt like she may be crying tears of happiness if she still could cry at all.

Instead she just pushed back against Gabriel, taking him as deep as she could, moaning into Kate's mouth and engraving this moment into her memory forever. It did help Gabriel felt really, really, really really good inside her, making her stretch her body when she came for the first time, the entire world she was perceiving narrowing down to nothing but intense pleasure and tightness in her butt, the fingers on her body and the nipple being nibbled at.

Nothing really compared to Gabriel and his lovers like this.

When, after an almost excruciating amount of peaks for herself, Gabriel whispered his own quickly approaching climax at her, she just bit at Kate's shoulder and came once again, receiving his hot, thick seed inside her backside where it would remain for some time.

Final conclusion, anal was great and the only thing she would regret was how long it took for Gabriel to fuck her up the ass.


With your immediate problems solved for the moment (and Taylor rather quite insensate, but she'll recover in no time), you turn your attention to other things you decided to put onto your to-do-list. A few quick looks reveal the cryogun's firing mechanism to be deceptively simple and straightforward to reverse-engineer once someone knows the trick, whereas the cryopods you kept from Vault 111's original setup are actually just a system of cooling mechanisms meant to link into each other without actually shockfrosting a human being once applied.

Both are added to your mental library of technology. It has to be said that effective use of these technologies requires liquid nitrogen for the gun at the very least, though you may be able to cheat around that issue with the pods by abusing your magic. Something to look into.

Next off, getting in touch with your infernal lawyer through the usual method of repeating her name thrice, you find out that it is entirely possible to trade souls for material goods of all kinds as long as you know the right demons- something your contract with her more than covers. For a payment of a couple dozen souls, you could easily acquire just about any kind of rare metal you require, such as the ones you've been only slowly accumulating so far, and field as many robots as you want.

Or rather, a many as the factory off towards the coast can produce in a given period of time. Same difference for practical purposes.

Incidentally, prices for such goods are fluctuating all along the infinite planes of hell's circles all the time, one of the few commodities with a sufficiently stable price due to the universal demand for more by just about everyone around being souls, hence their use as de facto currency. That said, you can haggle a good bit and catch things at decent prices easily thanks to your connections, so it's not too big of a problem.

Also, bulk orders are always good. That's just a universal constant, apparently.

That said, you aren't finalizing anything just yet. Right now you have an entirely separate matter to attend to.

That is, more preparations for your kids. That are going to be born and dammit, you'll shower them with enough love to drown out the entirety of whatever world you happen to be on at the moment!


Building a nursery comes with its own unique challenges and considerations, like any other act of creation. The first thing you thus do, once you really get into the meat of the planning process, is to determine what exactly those considerations are and how you will approach them.

Yes, even ignoring the likelihoods of your wives giving birth here on Earth Fallout. You still need to be prepared and you can always just copy or adapt everything you come up with here later on.

For one, your kids shall be as comfortable and happy as they possibly can. That's the basic premise of everything you're about to do. However, some other issues will inevitably crop up; sunlight is an obvious one, necessitating a good, sunproof design for everything else. Perhaps putting parts of the nursery underground would be a good idea here, simulate a kind of day/night cycle to naturally teach them when and how to avoid daylight.

Then, of course, there's the matter of enhanced physical abilities and various powers your kids will most likely inherit from birth, so you need to make the furniture and the walls as solid as you can without sacrificing looks and comfort or alternatively just make them easily replaceable, there's feeding sacrifices to your children to ensure they'll grow up as well as they can, which is a challenge it itself as you can't have them doing pretty much anything that could endanger your kids…

It is a lot. Luckily you are perfectly suited to meeting this challenge in theory.

Now in practical terms, you can't help but wonder what color of curtains, bed sheets, furniture etcetera would work best. You'll likely just end up making a couple sets in different colors and try to match them to be aesthetically pleasing, but what if your kids end up having a wildly different sense of appreciation for their surroundings than you can envision?

They'll be born vampires, after all, the first to ever exist. You have no idea how any of that will work out, how undead they will be exactly, whether they will even need a nursery like this, but just in case they do, you need to be prepared. No effort shall be spared for the sake of your children.

And now that Sarah isn't with you for the moment, she can't even keep you from fretting over this endlessly for once. You love her to bits just as much as your unborn kids or any of your other wives, but she really does have a tendency to take it too easy in regards to some of these things.


The room layout requires some careful arranging- and rearranging, as you go through the floor plan, but that's par for the course, naturally. You also go through several prototypes, a couple of general concepts you sketch up and discard rapidly and to keep it short, you probably put far more work into this than you would strictly need, but it is totally worth it and nobody can tell you otherwise.

A simple contraption that can let prisoners be suspended from a wall without giving them any room to meaningfully move or, indeed, see anything going on is also added to the feeding room, as you've dubbed it, and with a few more finishing touches and a little flourish you finally have the entire building planned out in detail.

Now all that remains is to have the Bobs you have on hand at all times see it and start digging out the basement and fill out the foundations! Though maybe you should have Codsworth look this over, too, just in case he has anything constructive to add?

… Okay, this may take a good bit longer, but screw it, you're doing this.


This place, from the looks of it, used to be a middle school. 'Used to' because, like everything else in this shithole of a dimension, it's half torn down and half rotting for centuries. It's just one of those little things you get used to after a while.

The reason you're here is a small, but noticeable presence of armed people coming into and out of the place periodically, as the footage of your Bat robots shows. They're being careful about it, too, sending scouts ahead every time someone enters or leaves, but few people in the Commonwealth are really aware of just how easy it is to spy on them with a practically infinite number of small flying robots that can just keep more or less stable in up to low orbit if you want the ones equipped with the requisite technology installed to do so.

… Actually, you take it back, pretty much nobody is really prepared for something like that.

Nevertheless, cursory analysis of what you have on tape makes it clear that something unusual has to be going on, for there are too many people coming in and out too frequently for this to be some minor waystation. Also, you're pretty sure these guys are Gunners going by the camo patterns many of them sport on their clothe.

The same group of raider-adjacent mercenaries that finished off the Minutemen in Quincy and kind of gave Preston PTSD. Now you don't particularly care about that as such, but you can't very well ignore a bunch of them so close to your own operations- what if they're here to take your minions down or something equally stupid? You didn't go through all this trouble just to have them fucked over before you can really use them as a less threatening branch of your expanding control in this dimension.

Some investigation quickly reveals what you're looking for, of course; behind a set of bars and a barred door your quickly force open you find both some little trap mechanism that unloads an electric charge at you (you caught and absorbed it with your claws without issue) and the door to the basement… where an entrance to another Vault Tec vault is hidden.

They put it right under the school. Maybe as a way to collect younger test subjects for something? Or it could have just been convenient to present it as 'ready to shelter the kids', Americans love that kinda stuff.

Either way, you can see the blood signatures through walls of concrete and metal both. There's a couple dozen of them down here.


It is, unsurprisingly, quite easy to make your way into the vault. The big, hermetically sealed cog-shaped door up front is missing, not that it would've really stopped you, but a few steps into the actual vault area you come upon your victims tonight.

Because let's make it clear, these guys are victims. You're a shadow clinging to the ceiling, moving as good as invisible to these suckers, lurking above where none of them ever look until it just is too late.

Never looking up is an evolutionary weakness you never tire in taking advantage of. It's just so. Incredibly. Easy.

A couple of Gunners are keeping watch, but they aren't terribly watchful; one of them wanders off to sit down in a side room filled with luggage and similar that strikes you as likely having been left here when the bombs fell, indicating a successful evacuation, and you are happy to swing down from the ceiling, emerging from your shadow form and grabbing his neck and shoulders to pull him up.

Your feet are solidly attached still as though you were standing on even ground, letting you drag him with you and away from any possible sources of noise as you bite into his soft throat.

Very quickly you have a corpse on your hands, lots of blood and a new soul in your belly. You stash the first of those under a desk really quick, not willing to go out of your way here but also not about to leave the body out in the open against your every instinct honed through long experience.

Old habits die hard and all.

You repeat your little trick a couple more times before you enter the vault proper, appearing from above or behind to feats on the living like some bad horror movie monster and still chewing by the time you flip the little switch that opens these 'special' doors. Why Vault Tec needed some sliding doors instead of a normal model you doubt you'll ever understand, but hey, more power to their wasteful spending.

Gunners all throughout the vault find their sudden ends at your hands one after the other. Walking around the notably sizeable construction, maintaining their gear in a few rooms used for storage, sleeping, awake, one of them on the toilet, even (she was already done by the time you got around to her), you get them all with about the same amount of emotion you feel when you take your time to draw a sketch or solve a puzzle.

It is nice to see things come together, to use timing and opportunities to take them out separately and at times just create them yourself by pretending to be one of the people you just ate, even, acting like them to get the suckers to split up only to have a little 'surprise' at your claws and teeth.

One thing you find interesting in particular is the predominance of workout equipment and bulky medical devices all over the vault (you think the latter are medical in nature, anyway). Given what you know about how Vault Tec treated the inhabitants of these places and, more importantly, what they treated them as, you do wonder a little what kind of experimentation they performed here.

Maybe drug development? Superior steroid variants like Psycho? The psychological effects of making average people work out over long periods of time?

So many possibilities, really. Though you can't help but find this approach somewhat wasteful to your vampiric sensibilities- all of these test subjects could've been slashed in half in number, easily, and left more cattle for later.

Can't be helped now, at any rate.

Then you come upon what you can only describe as a crummy replica of a war-torn fifties' diner- an average fifties' diner, in other words- and, upon chewing your way through another pair of Gunners one of which is holding onto a laser rifle, find a key card of some sort, except bulky and somewhat oddly-shaped.

On the guy you just ate, of course.

There's also a terminal not far from the big building itself. Your hands feel a little dirty, but you use it experimentally, finding out that this is actually a shooting range of sorts with hologram projectors creating simple featureless white mannequins for you to shoot at.

Iiinteresting. Less for the implications on what this place was used for and more because you're totally taking this whole thing apart at some point to figure out how it works.

The door for the keycard isn't hard to find, you walked past it earlier, so you have access to a whole 'nother section. This one is a lot cleaner, though still messy, and you can see more and more high-tech (relative to what Earth Fallout would consider such) devices around you.

No more workout equipment, though.

There's Gunners here, too, more clustered than not, but you eat your way through them, too. As it turns out, these ones aren't any smarter than the ones in the rest of the vault, frequently straying from the herd and turning their backs to the dark corners all around them.

Nothing goes over easy prey when you're in a mood to feed.


Finally, you come upon what seems to be some kind of office, though it's still just as trashed as everything else so far. What sets it aside, though, is the large curved desk dominating the room and giving you the impression of its purpose almost immediately and the pair of doors, one to the side and open letting you get a look at what seems to be a private quarter of some kind and one door whose placement immediately makes you think of an escape route in case the vault's overseer (if the terminology is the same between this vault and Vault 111) needs to get out real quick.

Some of these things are just always the same, really. Too easy to see through this stuff.

What's more, there are two people inside; the last two living people inside this underground structure, too. One is sitting behind the desk, male with a short haircut (something Gunners seem to favor in general), currently groaning as he holds the second person in place under said desk. "That's a good recruit. Keep it up and you'll be rising in ranks in no time."

Guess someone's getting a blowjob. Good on him, though it won't save the guy.

You slide over the ceiling, curved metal and the odd piece of exposed piping serving as no barrier to you at all.

Turns out the female Gunner giving him head is brunette, you note with a detached idleness of sorts. You let yourself fall, soundlessly landing behind the guy in your physical form once again, and waste no time in eating him, too, biting into the base of his neck and leaving a jagged gash behind once you're done draining the life out of him in a few deep, heavy gulps.

And the chick down below is still dutifully sucking his cock. It strikes you as funny, somehow, how she didn't notice a thing.


"Aaargh!" She certainly does notice, however, when your claws pierce a shoulder and pull her up past the now-corpse of her apparent superior. "Wha- please don't! No!"

As it happens, you do, despite her protestations. A quick bite later you have eradicated all the Gunners within this location, rapidly feeding on them one after the other without any of them ever noticing.

You still got it, heh.

Still, kicking the two bodies off to the side, you take a moment to look through the Overseer's desk and, more importantly, the still intact terminal standing right on it. You reflexively use the sides of your claws to type instead of your fingers, just so you don't have to touch it with any shorter digits, and get right down to reading.


So. Vault 75, built directly under Malden Middle School and meant to cater to the kids in particular- when the bombs fell and people took shelter, the first thing the employees here did was to separate the adults that came with their kids and execute them on the spot.

Because this vault's experiment didn't require them.

The core concept was pretty simple; natural selection is what applies when a species' environment naturally selects for certain characteristics within that species, such as a specifically shaped set of teeth or certain levels of strength or intelligence, not that stronger automatically means better in this case- bigger muscles require more nutrients and upkeep thereof, to name just one part of things.

That and reproductive success is the real gatekeeper here, so it isn't so much the environment as it is the levels of horny and the amount of progeny a certain organism can produce through them. Environmental stressors only really matter insofar as those that die or don't have time to fuck don't get to have more sex and subsequently have less kids.

Evolution is really only an exercise in statistics from a certain point of view.

None of that mattered to these people, though. What they did was they tested the kids they kept alive (and told their parents were just elsewhere instead of dead) for athleticism, physical capabilities and such, going so far as to train them specifically to make them the best fighters they could possibly be, which is where the simulation training room and shooting range came from, you now realize.

Then they harvested the genetic material of the most promising subjects, disposing of all of them while they went on to artificially accelerate the growth process of the new fetuses they created by combining them. The goal was to create a sort of superior human race based solely off of physical performance, running this whole process through several iterations and noting down the marked improvements across the board as far as the kids they kept on making and killing could perform across several generations.

The thing was, though, the scientists doing the whole thing weren't going to last forever, so they actually also recruited from the smarter kids coming out of the experiment. It's all detailed in the instructions for how to run the vault, including how they were supposed to have the kids being disposed of do a while 'ceremony' while pretending they were going to the surface to help scavenge supplies for the vault, only to be killed thinking they were going to be decontaminated before going up.

Until keeping one of the children groomed to keep the experiment running isolated from things for a couple generations was't enough to have him forget about the little fact his crush wasn't alive and on the surface and instead murdered with her genetic material serving to create more kids, as you figured out upon finding a terminal he apparently used to write a journal on.

He then burned down parts of the hidden segment of the vault the scientists were using to observe the kids without ever being noticed, destroying the storage compartments with all the genetic data and possibly getting out with the survivors at the time- it's hard to tell, all you're pretty sure of is that most of the hidden scientists died, could be the rest made it out, could be they all bit it, too.

Either way, here you are with little to show for it. You reckon you could've used these guys' results yourself somehow, but more's the pity, nothing salvageable is left on that account.

Now, as for that hologram technology they used in their simulation room…


Overall, this stuff is actually surprisingly straightforward, assuming honest-to-you hologram generation can be described in such terms. A few specialized projectors, set up around a room to to their thing once activated. The real trick is in having them project light onto the air at the required location, but that's what this little bit of super science is for.

They also had motion sensors installed to let the holograms 'react' to being shot by being dispersed through the projectors shutting down upon being shot. It did its job to let the kids they were using as test subjects train to shoot at human-looking targets, you suppose.

Of course to actually get this far you had to take apart the whole room and dig into the walls to really get at the technology involved, but you consider this an investment. Not like the things were doing much good as it was, anyway.

Still, the night won't last forever and you actually have places to be.


Once back in Sanctuary, your personal island of peace and quiet away from any of the dirty peasants and filled with scientific discovery, blood and anything else you see fit to fill it up with, you first take a moment to look over those artillery building instructions again.

… They're really simplified to the extreme, but that doesn't stop you from just taking them as a base to work off of at your leisure. For one, adding in some presumed parts you can easily mass-produce using your industrial capabilities simplifies things from a different perspective, even if it is presumed now that those parts are available.

On the other hand, at least people won't use what's essentially improvised mortars made out of pipes anymore. That has to count for something.


Mortar Upgrades

3 Points: Targeting: Improve the targeting mechanism to let even dumber monkeys use these things

3 Points: Hydraulics: Implement a hydraulics system to make it faster and easier to make the cannons aim where they're supposed to and change targets when necessary

3 Points: Range: These things cover a good area already and are limited more due to the difficulties of actually finding a target than anything else, but that won't stop you. A longer barrel, a little adjustment to maintain accuracy, and voila.

3 Points: Anti-Air: Normally, these artillery pieces are meant for groundbound enemies, as there are virtually no flying threats that something like these would work against, but with your current situation… A few adjustments to let them properly aim at things in the sky won't go amiss


Diamond City. You know, for a place you've heard a good bit about and that's so important to what little centralized civilization exists around the Commonwealth by this point, you never really did visit it yourself.

Well, no time like the present. Thanks to the teleporters that have become a mainstay of your factory near the shore (Seaside properties are usually worth a lot as long as they aren't in danger of flooding, aren't they?), you have yourself moved into the place swiftly and easily, walking straight through an old stadium entrance without any of the guards nearby so much as raising an eyebrow.

Always nice to just do that. Nobody expects the equivalent to a tactical nuke to walk around like any other guy, not that anyone around here even knows what you can do in the first place.

So… Diamond City. A ramshackle affair built into an old baseball stadium with whatever salvage people could get their hands on, reeking with the stink of sweat, fecal matter and requiring an unsteady bunch of metal plates strewn onto the ground to let people walk without sinking into the muck under and beside them.

Truly the shining jewel of the Commonwealth.

You make your way through the area, taking a moment to tune our senses to the level of hubbub going on and dodging past locals that hate anyone that's not a local (and most other locals too, for that matter), outsiders looking distrustful and wary of everyone else and a couple market stalls once you reach the central area- there's a robot cooking noodles made of razorgrain (one of those wasteland crops, obviously), a woman creaming about there being no synths allowed, a smarmy dude selling weapons and ammunition of all kinds and a guy hawking baseball bats as self-defense weapons, doctors, drug dealers, hairdressers, what looks like an improvised department store selling clothes and more.

It's a colorful place, you'll give it that. Still stinks worse than some sewers you've been to, though.

The guards, you feel the need to note, are wearing sports equipment as a uniform, which you suppose kind of makes sense; any decent kind of protection is sought after by those regularly in close contact with danger and this city was built into a literal baseball stadium, so of course they would end up using surplus equipment like this.

Now then, you actually did come here with a purpose in mind, so you go and approach one of them, giving him a confident and casual smile, the kind that people respond well to. "Hello there, would you mind giving me directions to the mayor's place?"


It doesn't take you long to get to the mayor's office, situated inside of what used to be the stadium's press box and since rebuilt to suit its new purpose. The only way inside from within Diamond City's bounds is a lift, as the stands are not directly accessible from the stadium floor, so that's where you come in, not (yet) about to just jump your way up there outright.

That said, it does take a moment for the stupid thing to come down, apparently someone already went up there earlier. Naturally, you strike up a chat with the guards hanging around, both to waste some time and to find out as much as you can, all the while implying you're an important person of some description, nobody should ask because it's just that obvious, that kind of thing.

"The Wright chick came up to complain again in person. Her and the mayor have been at each other's throats for months, but they went at it harder lately."

"Wright? Piper Wright, the one with the newspaper?" You do remember Nora saying something about meeting a journalist when she first came to town. Something along the lines of her not being allowed back into Diamond City and bluffing through with her help?

"Yeah, that's the one. Heard they got an old 'printing press' going to print a bunch of them," the other guard says.

The first one nods. "Wright's been disagreeing how the mayor's been handling synths and what he's been doing in general. Printed a couple articles and just like that, people are looking at Mayor McDonough hard enough he feels the pressure, so he blames her for it… You can imagine the rest."

"Mhm," you make, looking up. "Looks like that's her, too, coming right for us."

Wearing a red leather jacket and a little journalist hat, the black-haired woman tapping her foot on the metal of the lift looks to be positively fuming, arms crossed and tension around her eyes. This is someone that didn't get what they want.

"Sheesh, get ready for the bitchening," one of the guards you were just talking to warns the other with a roll of his eyes.


When the lift comes all the way down, an angry young woman is stepping off of it, grinding her teeth and transmitting her wrath into the ground with every step.

The guards are stepping aside already, demonstratively staring elsewhere when she starts cussing them out. "And what did you numb-nuts do while I was gone, pretend you were actually doing something that's any use at all?"

"We were guarding the lift, like we do every day." If you didn't know any better, you'd believe this guy had that line on the ready on general principle. "Now if you wouldn't mind, we have traffic to wave through."

"Must be a cold day in hell you lot are good for something," the apparent reporter (?) grumbles. "And who are you? I haven't seen you around DC before and the mayor doesn't let just anyone into his office."

You raise an eyebrow, amused at her manners more than anything else. "Oh, I'm sure he'll make some time once I ask nicely. Besides, you got in and I don't imagine you're his favorite person in the world."

"Hah, no, I just bullied his guard dogs and his secretary until they let me through." Turning around, she glares up past the visibly uncomfortable men in sports gear to look up at the mayor's office box. "Because someone has to do something if we don't want this city to come down around our ears and our dear mayor keeps on refusing to take any action, at all, because that would mean not everything is sunshine and rainbows in his little world!"

You know, you don't mind her ranting like that. It's actually kind of cute to see her rile herself up about something she cares about.

That said, the guards are looking increasingly like they might do something soon-ish, so you put a hand on her shoulder to redirect her attention. "Oh, what kinds of things is the mayor refusing to do exactly?" As you talk, you use a split second to wink at the guards to make them think you're distracting her for them.

"What doesn't he?! There's a massive hole in the wall anyone could walk straight through and they just put a shelf in front of it! Not even a good one, a supermutant could walk right through it and get into the middle of the city! The guards are using crappy guns that explode sometimes and the turrets out in the perimeter just don't fire at all every week or two! And don't get me started on the traders and what passes for Diamond City's radio station!"

Gently pushing her back, you move away from the lift to the mayor's office, nodding along. "Oh, before we go on, my name is Gabriel, Gabriel Livsey. I actually heard about you from Nora."

"Oh, is she alright? She hasn't been around for a while, but she didn't strike me as the city type. Too much backbone to stick around," Piper grumbles. "I'm Piper Wright, owner and reporter for the Publick Occurrences, Diamond City's premier and only newspaper. Pleasure to meet you."

"Pleasure's all mine. So you've been trying to get the mayor to deal with these issues around this place?"

"Yes, dammit. It started with him just ignoring the people that went missing presumably due to the Institute, but ever since he's ignored anything I try to point out or advocate solutions for! It's infuriating!" Piper leans onto your side as you walk without really thinking about it. "And he's gone so far to have his goons lock me up and try to just keep me out of the city. As if me going away would make the problems go away."

She's still pretty tense, but you feel you're getting somewhere. "Mhm, maybe I'll try to talk to him about it later. Anyway, where are you going next? Anything I can help you with?"

Naturally, you're letting her rest her weight against you and feel your muscles under your clothing.

"… Tell you what, I'm going home, but I could use a little help later." Oh, she's doing the 'fuck me' eyes and biting her lip. "Unless you mind…?"


"Oh, I don't mind at all," you smile at Piper, earning a light dusting of red on her cheeks. "Business before pleasure though, else we wouldn't get anything done ever again. How about this, I'll go see the mayor about my own business and try to bring up the things you mentioned and we'll meet in a couple hours at most?"

"Alright, that's fine with me." Mild disappointment there, but more because she doesn't get immediate validation than anything else. She'll live. "Meet me at my home? It's not far from the main entrance and it's right next to the business, got a big Publick Occurrences sign and all."

"Definitely," you agree and promptly lean down, pressing a kiss on her cheek and feeling it heat up with a blush through your lips.

Someone can't wait already.

"Hello Mayor McDonough, my name is Gabriel Livsey. I'm sorry if this meeting was a bit unplanned for you, but I needed to talk to you about something."

The mayor's office is just as messy as any other place, but you've given up on really civilizing anything outside of Sanctuary at this point. Nevertheless, you can deal with these people as is.

"Oh, not at all, not at all." The first impression you get is that this guy is a total pushover, trying to please whoever he's talking to at the time- but obviously, that's not all there is to it. "I have been waiting for you, I was supposed to give you this."

You raise an eyebrow, for another reason this time, and receive the piece of paper the mayor is holding out to you. Glancing over it, you look back at him.

"Beta-Eight-Five-Nomen."

"Standby Mode Activated. Awaiting Instructions."

Huh. Turns out the Institute actually replaced the mayor at some point… And made sure he would stay under control, too. Except they've decided they don't care what happens above ground anymore and left a list with codes to manipulate him to you.

This is even easier than expected. Also may explain why he ignored everything Piper was throwing a fit about- he wasn't instructed to and so decided not to risk doing anything beyond the barebones of his job, you're guessing.


With more or less complete control of the mayor secured already, you can directly move into taking control of Diamond City as such; your telepathy is aglow with messages you're sending to everyone related to the things you're doing now and whose help you need to organize things on the fly over here.

First off, Diamond City is now officially aligned with the New Minutemen and will be protected by and support the organization you had Preston build up from nearly nothing. That means some of Preston's people will be around and joining the guards in actually protecting the city''s perimeter, for starters, but that's far from all.

One of your improved fusion-core driven generators and water purifiers respectively will be brought along with them to be installed inside the city to help supply electricity and clean drinking water on a larger scale than there currently are, as well as several Bobs and a couple Hammers to go with the Minutemen contingent already being prepared to come all this way. The latter are obvious in their use, but the former will be repairing and building up a couple of things around the place.

Much as you'd like to just tear down this entire heap of junk and rebuild it in your image and your image alone, that would probably upset the locals, so you're instead just having a few bots do this the slow way. As long as nothing falls in on itself, you shall simply pretend the 'buildings' of Diamond City do not exist and move on.

Speaking of, you're also donating a good few bottlecaps to the city's public works; you've just kind of been ignoring that, too, but you actually have a decent stash of them lying around thanks to the 'proceeds' of various parts of your operations- sure, some of the stuff technically belongs to the Minutemen, but it isn't like Preston couldn't just take as many as he wants. For the time being, a couple thousand of the things will be used to fix minor issues Piper pointed out earlier and similar stuff.

Turns out the mayor isn't exactly swimming in caps, which might also explain why he didn't do anything, though you didn't exactly bother asking.

Lastly and most importantly, the public declaration of all of these wonderful things will be happening sometime tomorrow, along with an official notice of a hostile invasion by the Brotherhood of Steel rumored to take place soon-ish. Mostly to make sure people prepare and stock up on food- which will be sold in larger quantities than normal thanks to your surplus production kept up on Abernathy Farm and the mirelurk range (they actually started reproducing harder lately when they realized they couldn't dig themselves out easily).

That and you want to make yourself look better when you get around to beating that invasion to the ground.

But none of that matters much now. Instead, you're jaunting through the streets of Diamond City, making your way towards where you know Piper's home to be.

Publick Occurrences. An actual newspaper. Far as you know from having met her briefly and Nora's own impression, Piper does seem to be the inquisitive sort, so you'd better keep your own activities reasonably quiet around her, but as long as you do so, you don't see anything problematic in a fling or two.

When you find the right place, you make note of the younger girl standing outside bearing some resemblance to Piper, hawking her newspaper- probably a family member or something. You don't pay her much mind, instead approaching the unlocked door you can see a grown woman's blood signature behind.

"I've been waiting for you," Piper says as soon as you come in, turning to face you with a cocky smile.

"My bad, the mayor had a lot of things to discuss with me, it turned out." You look her over to make sure she knows what you're thinking of. "But let's not talk about him too much right now, shall we?"

"Mhm, I can think of something you would like more, yes." And with that, Piper opens up her red jacket, revealing her complete lack of any clothing under it, one hand darting down to push at her pants. "And me, too."

Grinning, you follow suit and shrug off your own clothing.


Nat held her breath as she made sure nobody was paying attention to her for once now that she'd stopped shouting to try and hand out newspaper issues. Satisfied, she creeped towards the looking hole she knew was in the living room wall, out back behind her home and out of the public's view.

She'd noticed her sister had been acting weird earlier when she'd asked if Nat would be keeping to her usual; normally, Piper just asked if she was sure she didn't want to call it a day a little early and have dinner already, plus she'd been evasive when Nat tried to investigate.

Then a while later this stranger walked right into their home, where she knew Piper would be? It screamed 'suspicious' louder than mystery meat. So Nat was secretly taking a look, just to find out what her sister was keeping from her.

Carefully sliding a piece of wood to the side, she heard her sister talking from somewhere around her desk. "What are you waiting for?"

Nat's eyes went wide when she saw how she was bending over her desk and what she was wearing. Not wearing. She could see her privates in plain view!

Behind her was the man she'd seen earlier, even more naked than Piper. Nat could see his jacked body, his really handsome face now that she took a close look and, as he took a step towards her sister, the big throbbing thing between his legs.

Nat wasn't unaware of what was going on, Piper had given her the talk ages ago just in case. That was a penis, and it was going to…

It was going to go into her sister. But nothing that big could fit into someone, right?

"Someone can't wait, huh?" The man asked, putting his hands on Piper's naked butt. Nat swallowed.

"I've been waiting for this for hours now, let's get on with it already!"

She sounded needy and eager, something Nat couldn't remember her sister ever doing. The man chuckled, putting his thing against her.

She was feeling tingly as she watched…


Nat swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry, when he pushed his hips forward, making his penis go into her sister. The reporter who may as well be a superhero as far as she was concerned made a sound, long, drawn-out and deep.

A moan, she realized.

She could see how the penis went all the way inside, unbelievably spreading Piper around it. Looking back up at the man's face, she froze when she saw him look back at her as his hips met her sister's butt.

He… winked at her? Did that mean she wasn't in trouble forever?

"Ooh, you're so biiig…!" Piper was shaking herself a little and Nat couldn't help but imagine how it had to feel, to have a big thing like that inside of her and move around to feel it even more. Her breath was coming out quicker and quicker as not only her cheeks were growing hot…

"And you're nice and tight," the man growled, having turned back towards her. He pulled out and pushed in again, making a wet squelching sound that was just really, really lewd. "Perfect for a good, hard fuck!"

He took her by her elbows and pulled back, making Piper stand up so Nat could see more of what was happening. Her sister's eyes were hooded and her mouth slightly opened as she gasped, her body naked except for her opened jacket hiding nothing and her boots and socks.

The tingles grew stronger as Nat watched Piper's heaving, round breasts and the penis thrusting between her spread legs. Giving her surroundings one more suspicious look, she looked down on herself, pulling and pushing at her skirt and pants just a little.

Crouched behind her house, Nat freed up her hips, letting her touch her nasty bits. Both hands buried between her legs, she rubbed to imitate the sex inside the living room, feeling the very best kind of dirty.

Then one of her fingers pushed inside of her and it felt amazing, so much so she took a bit to realize what was happening inside.

The errant reporter was being pushed with every thrust, moving into Nat's direction one upwards push at a time. She didn't seem to notice, lost in how good she was feeling (a flare of jealousy lit up, though it was suppressed quickly- Nat would be split in two by something that big, surely), but soon she was right in front of the secret peeping hole, both hands pressed against the wall far above Nat's position.

That meant she could see her sister's vagina perfectly with the one eye that could see inside, the long rivulets of clear fluid going down her thighs, the veins on the penis plundering it and the swinging balls underneath, slapping against her every time it went it. Somehow, this was much better than being told about how sex worked when Piper had sat her down back then.

Nat's heart was pumping so loudly she was sure everyone in half the city had to be able to hear it, blood rushing through her ears, but she stayed there, two fingers buried inside her and pumping to the rhythm the stranger was dictating with his thrusts into her sister. She was inhaling and exhaling shallowly, pressed against the wall so closely she could feel the thumping against it from the act inside.

She almost mistook it for more breathless moaning, but Piper was saying something, quickly and repeatedly. "I'm cumming I'm cumming I'm cumming I'm cumming I'm cummiiiiiing!"

She was shivering and tensing up all over and all of a sudden, she was slumping down, just hanging there with the hands on her hips and the penis inside her the only thing holding her up so she didn't fall to the ground.

Nat had never been so happy her sister wouldn't be able to see her with this angle.

"Oh!" He'd been holding still, but the stranger gave another couple experimental thrusts. "Not done yet, cowboy?"

"Not by a long shot. I can keep going a couple rounds. You good to go yourself?"

"… I think I'll just hang here and let you- Oh! Ooooh!"

They kept going, their sounds masking the wet movement of Nat who was feeling naughty fluids on her fingers, too. The big penis never rested, always drilling inside of Piper, and it took what felt like forever for it to go even faster.

Piper's waist was being pushed almost all the way against the wall by this point- if Nat wanted, she could stretch a finger through the hole to touch where she was taking the man's penis inside her, red, engorged opening spread lewdly, she was afraid her sister might feel her breath any moment now.

"I'm about to come," she heard him say with a growl in his voice, making shivers run down her spine. "Where do you want it?"

"Gnh, not, ungh, inside," Piper forced out. "Can't, ugh, risk iiiiit!"

She did it again, but this time the man's thing sped up faster and faster until it pulled out, wet length sliding against Nat's sister and poking into the air right in front of her peephole. She saw it twitch, the bulbous head right there, and out of the tip came a thick, white fluid, splattering against the wall above Nat.

Then it lowered and she held a hand in front of the hole, catching the white stuff in her palm. A few more spurts came, but they slowed down soon, letting her look again.

The penis was still there, hovering right in front of her. "Haaah… I think I need a break. Want a nuka?"

"I wouldn't say no… Even if nibbling on your nipples sounds much more tempting."

"Jeez, don't be a weirdo…" Nat knew that tone. Piper was just embarrassed and trying to distract.

But there was still a penis and it was coming just a little closer… A flash of thought came through Nat's overstressed brain, only just now realizing she'd done the same thing Piper had done a bunch of, the tensing and shivering and the explosions in her mind. Looking up at where the stranger would be standing behind Piper, she leaned in…

And opened her mouth to stretch her tongue through the hole. She tasted the hard thing, feeling it slide against her wet tongue- it was hot and musky, the white liquid still dribbling from it a little, a little salty and savoury. Its tip was poking through to her side soon, so Nat took all her courage together and stopped retreating, instead taking the slick, throbbing organ into her mouth between her lips.

She licked it a few times, taking up her sister's juices and wringing a few more dollops from it. The stuff she'd caught felt like it was burning against her palm, but she stayed in place, mouth entirely filled with the penis of the man that had been railing her sister.

Then the moment was over and she got up to run away quicker and quieter than she ever had in her life, stumbling over her clothes until she tugged them back into position.

It still tasted weird, but good when she licked up everything in her hand and she ended up hanging around the market once she was done until she came back home when the sun was down, forever determined to pretend nothing had happened when she found her sister sound asleep on the couch.


Having left behind Diamond City and the very much delightful Wright sisters (even if one isn't aware of just how close you got to the other one), you find yourself back in Sanctuary inside a newly built dedicated summoning room, having a talk with your demonic lawyer.

She is in her voluptuous blue form today, though as a shapeshifter that doesn't say particularly much. However, it seems she kept in mind what you asked of her last time you talked, as she has a name and some current prices available as soon as you ask.

A quick bit of chanting and repeatedly calling a certain name later, you have a Crucible Demon in front of you, a humanoid creature with a skull-like face made entirely of metal and heat and, as it happens, a reliable source of metal and related material goods.

The trade itself doesn't take long to be finalized once it is present- good thing, too, it's heating up the room like nobody's business.

"Final arrangement," it speaks, voice an asynchronous rumble you can best describe as the bubbling of lava and the screeching shriek of metal against itself. "One dozen souls of specified quality for three tons of steel, copper, titanium, brass, gold, silver, uranium, scandium, yttrium, cobalt, lithium…"

It continues to enumerate everything encompassed within this trade, which is really just the rare earth elements you commonly use and that are so, annoyingly, rare to find in common consumer products on Earth Fallout. Turns out essentially stopping electronics development at vacuum tubes means it is kind of hard to really find the stuff you need for your robots' insides, among other things.

A couple tons really do help you a lot.

Once the Crucible Demon finishes, you nod, having kept careful track of each and every element you wanted. "I have the souls here and the wares will be delivered as specified in the contract. Is this acceptable to you?"

The not at all biologically living creature makes an indistinct sound like boiling metal. "Yes. Acceptable."

Five minutes later, you dismiss the demons you called upon and walk out, appreciatively noting the massive square blocks of metal standing outside your house. Always good to cast the souls of your victims unto eternal damnation in exchange for some stuff you don't want to wait to get being delivered right to your doorstep.

… Huh. That's kind of like amazon, isn't it? In a way, this whole demonology business isn't any worse than being a normal member of society.


Normally you don't quite like cooled blood, it's somehow like warm lemonade to draw a comparison, but when you're feeling hot, it's actually kind of nice. As a 'sometimes' kind of thing. You hope the younger Wright is having fun with the memories of your visit, you're definitely having fun 'talking' with Nora about your mutual acquaintance.

Without clothes, of course. Have to make sure your unborn children know you love them and their moms, after all.


You are currently inside one of your workshop rooms, by necessity having a bunch of them by this point. After you decided to just use Vault 111 as your personal base and research laboratory on Earth Fallout, you had more than enough space to use, not that it isn't just good sense to separate the place you summon demons in from the ones you work with dangerous biochemical threats to all life inside of (FEV AND ADAM needed a clear separate setup by themselves) and the location in which you store as much dead meat as you possibly can for the sake of repurposing it.

Not to mention all the other laboratories. And the alchemy workshop and… Well, you get the idea.

Back on track, here you are, pondering over a particular idea you've been mulling over for a while now. Your telepathic abilities have been growing more and more lately, little surprise when you keep on using them pretty much all the time, but there is one potential use for them you've been metaphorically stubbing your toes against for a while now; the transferrence of practical skills and experience.

It's not particularly surprising. A big part of your own personal strengths is your ability to steal from the experiences of those you eat and add useful parts to your own repertoire, literal thousands of perspectives and little day-to-day tricks enriching and empowering yourself in innumerable ways. However, that is you alone, whereas you have a lot of minions that, realistically, take care of most minor stuff you may need taken care of.

So what if there was a way to go and transfer your own accumulated experience and simple skill to others? It has to be said that you're the prime candidate for any such things, after all, on the basis of everyone that is not you being far too prone to fucking up.

With the possible exception of your wives and lovers, but your affection doesn't make you blind to their faults, few as they may be.

The solution you arrived to after weighing your options? You could just wait until your telepathy can do this, but in the meantime, it would be quite nice to have a way to transfer skills that perhaps doesn't rely on you thralling random minions you want to make useful first. Hence, the new undead you're working on right now.

A zombie in the approximate shape of a book. You will be imparting two of your spells unto it, relating to the modification and creation of minds, respectively, and using the synergy between them to effectively let it copy the knowledge it retains from you as your creation.

The only problems are the raw materials to use, how to really make it work effectively using your current abilities in the field of creating undead and how well you can minimize the risks to the piddly mortal minds you intend to use it on, but if it was easy, it would hardly be worth doing, now would it?


Combining the bits and pieces you've accumulated off of recent deaths is little issue, even if you do need to be a bit creative in splitting up and combining them- this thing is supposed to be working with minds which are horrendously easy to accidentally turn into mush, so you need some fragments that feel slow and lazy as opposed to… well, literally any of the frantic or aggressive ones.

Just a general precaution on your part.

That said, you aren't yet done. Getting a bunch of human skin and flesh is easy enough to grab and reshape into the appropriate forms, plus you have access to literal tons of gold at the moment so you can go ahead and reshape a little of it to serve as decoration and binding. However, those aren't the only raw materials you want to be using, naturally.

You don't have much of it, but you did bring a sample of orichalcum with you to Earth Fallout, with about enough for a clasp of the stuff done with replication by this point. Well, this stuff is just like that, though it's not as bad as adamantium, at the very least; the latter may be a part of the former, but the raw metal takes what feels like forever to be made from nothing the way you have it done.

Then there's the topic of demonic essence, as you've taken to using for projects like this. You don't exactly want to go out of your way all that much, but a quick summoning should net you Record Keeper just fine- a lower-ranking species of demon that thrives on the accumulation of knowledge.

There's several subcategories of course and some of them are surprisingly strong, but knowledge seems to be a whole thing for several kinds of hell's denizens. The stronger ones aren't something you're willing to touch without a decent plan in mind, though.

Tricky and powerful both, as you understand it. Turns out nerds are pretty strong in hell, who'd've thought.

So you find yourself taking a trip to your summoning chamber, setting up your circles and lighting up a couple candles, with the next best excuse to intact books you could find on the fly arranged around it.

(Comic books actually weathered the nuclear apocalypse better than you would've expected.)

"Purveyor of Knowledge, Seeker of Truths, appear before Me on this ground. Such Is My Call that I Demand Your Presence!"

Sure, the chanting is stupid, but at least you don't have to sacrifice an inkwell and chalk along with an accounting book. Ritual requirements can be pretty out there for those that can't just circumvent them by sheer virtue of being you.


It comes with the scent of old, dusty books and melting candle wax, rising from the ground of your summoning circle like a finger stretched into a tight opening. Faded green skin with little muscle and absolutely no fat characterizes the mildly emaciated humanoid figure, its bulk added to in exchanged by the burning candles it bears on its back.

It has no eyes nor nose and its ears are degraded into holes on the sides of its head, but in exchange its mouth is extremely large, jagged, long and flat teeth easily visible due to the lack of lips, like they've been cut away and never really healed over with raw flesh visible where they used to be. Its distended, misshapen head is crowned by a diadem of sorts with spikes rising into the air off of it and, judging by the bleeding, into ist skull, too.

All over the front of its body, eleven golden keys are stuck inside of it, still bleeding wounds where they are poking into the air. Each of them has a band of white cloth wrapped around the rings meant to go on a keyring, one of those really old and big ones.

In short, it's creepy and ugly, but you can deal with that.

Before it gets a word out, you're on the Record Keeper, slamming an armored fist into its 'face' and caving it in as a 'greeting'. Next you proceed to methodically demolish the creature, breaking and dislocating limbs, throwing it against the wall and disemboweling it with your claws, all the good stuff.

Turns out violence is still the one universal language even when dealing with demons, but you knew that already. That's why you opened negotiations up like this.

Before long you have the round, fist-sized essence of the demon in your hand, forcefully pushed into this form by your magic. It's constantly moving in different directions at once as it rotates around itself, which is fun to watch, but otherwise it's really just like any of the others you've handled so far.

You put it next to the by now already shaped pieces of gold and the rough main body you'll be wrapping them around soon. Just a bit of chanting and some modifying of the biomass you're using and voila, you have everything you need.

A bit of gold makes everything look better and not at all overtly sinister.

Carefully opening the orichalcum clasp that keeps it closed (it kind of does fit with the color scheme, which you are glad for), you make sure the blank pages made of thinly drawn-out human flesh are as they're supposed to- the thin covering of skin is as even as possible and nothing sticks together, that kind of thing.

A few corrections later, you nod, satisfied- and place the essence you have 'formatted' to be clean of the demon's personality between the pages, then add the extremely dense mass of languid, almost sluggish soul matter 'next to' it once you've drawn it out of your reserves.

Slamming it shut, you concentrate on everything you want this living dead book to do. "Rise, my fleshly servant!"


Demonic Essence Bonus: Living Library: The Necronomicon may absorb other books and add them it itself so any text can be read in its pages freely; may gain additional properties depending on the books absorbed and what is written inside them.

Magical Effects To Be Imbued:

Major: Correct Mental Damage, Estimate Potential Mental Damage, Inspire Skill Gain

Strong: Increased Body Articulation, Cause Mental Damage, Overload Minds

Basic: Increased Durability, Internal Organization, Hypnotic Patterns

Weak: Increased Toughness, Permanent Polish, Regeneration

Minor: Increased Density, Decomposition Immunity, Maker's Mark

Spells (As per Undead mage):

Mental Surgery

Create Mind

Slothful Soul:

Using spells on minds causes their owners to become slothful for several days while the new additions are added incrementally over this delayed time period, reducing chances of mental damage considerably

Short-range hypnotic sleep effect that can be used as a defensive feature

Can charge up power to release a powerful offensive blast or empower other effects by doing nothing for extended periods of time


The book comes to unlife with a twitch of its flesh, its spine moving for a moment before straightening out again. Now, theoretically, this thing would be perfectly capable of doing its job as is, but you have an old theory to test and if it pans out, the thing might actually work better than you expect it to, so you don't waste any time in casting the next spell at it.

"I give you a mind to think and learn!" For something as deep and fundamentally important as giving something a mind, the spell is almost insultingly quick to cast for all that it requires a lot of preparation work and some decent visualization if you want to get it just right instead of leaving the result up to chance.

Memories of your operations and your people, to go with all your skills and your practical knowledge as you usually share it with your undead, for what most of them are worth. All the dimensions you've been to, everyone you're planning on using this book on, the circumstances of things and how it was created.

All of that packed into the newly created mind along with the approximate attitude of that one college professor you remember that permanently had no patience for the dumb students but still had to deal with them plus a good helping of personal loyalty to yourself and whatever cause you decide to have.

The skull in the middle of the front cover wiggles, the small connecting bit of gold under it heaving and shoving until it sits against it like a jaw, then returning back down.

"Hello, sir. Nice to meet you for the first time, much as anything is right now," it says quietly, its front cover pretending to have a skeletal mouth to talk with.

"Nice to meet you too, I suppose. Sorry if this is a little awkward."

"Ah, no need, this is your first attempt at creating something that can think for itself, as opposed to taking something that already could and changing it… You had to start somewhere, Mister Livsey, better it be me than some abomination geared for war and nothing else."

"Please, feel free to call me Gabriel." Would be even more awkward otherwise. "Speaking of, would you like to have a name and if so, do you have any preferences?"

"As it happens, I do," the dry voice of your newest creation lets you know. "I have gained all knowledge the Record Keeper used in my creation had at the time of its repurposing, so I would like to name myself after a book somewhat well known in some dimensions. How does Necronomicon sound?"

"Sure, it's your choice," you shrug. "So… You fine with a quick test run or two?"

"If we must," the Necronomicon sighs, its jaw motions long and drawn-out. "My pages are already shriveling at the prospect, but if it helps, we shall go educate some people."

Works as intended so far.


"That's, like, sooo coool! I always wanted to have a talking book! Can I keep him?"

The Necronomicon sighs and you get the impression the skulls all over it are giving you a long suffering look. "No, you may not. Now if you would open one of my pages please, I would like to begin."

"Any one I want? Lessee…"

Cupcake uses both hands to handle your creation, acting before she receives a confirmation. Once the Necronomicon is open, you get the faint feeling it is doing something, though the much more obvious indicator of its activity is Cupcake's face going slack and her gaze growing unfocused for a long moment.

"Oh… That hit me up good… I think I'll go have a nap. Maybe two." The pint-sized chemist drops the book (it catches itself by snapping shut) and staggers, one hand going to the wall to keep herself standing.

"Did it work?" You need some feedback before you can let her leave. Technically, the Necronomicon cannot act against your orders (or interests, in a wider, less closely defined sense), but you wouldn't exactly know if there were any loopholes you needed to close up without confirming any possible issues.

"Yeah, I'm… I can feel a lot of stuff in my head, but it's kind of just there. Like cotton candy lining my skull-"

"My effects are delayed as to be more effective, as you will find out soon. The more you rest, the faster your mind will assimilate the new information, though no amount of infusion of this sort is a replacement for proper practice. I'd suggest you take this time to reflect on your actions and attitude, though I don't expect it to make any difference."

"Yeah, sure, Mister Talky Book, whatever you say," Cupcake waves the advice off. "Can I have a fairy to feed myself with while I languish in bed?"

"Please," you make, amused, "as if I don't know what you two get up to. Snorting powdered sugar isn't healthy by the way."

"It's the big dream until I find a way to have enough aura at once to create a theme park out of cakes and sweets!"

"Sure, sure, just don't overdo it. And clean up after yourself." Waving a hand, you generate a sweets fairy that proceeds to whoop aloud and propel itself into Cupcake's dark hair (and then messes it up using its whole body). The two flounce off, the human thrall still moving a little sluggishly, but that's pretty much that.

"She really should see about getting professional counseling, not that I see that possibility in her near future."

"Why?" You ask. "Sure, she's essentially a bundle of unhealthy coping mechanisms that have taken over her life, but it's not like they're impeding how she wants to live it."

"And that is why she will not seek help nor will she be guided toward doing so. A missed opportunity," the Necronomicon laments. "Still, I believe this serves as a proof of concept. You may find that Miss Addison will have an easier time utilizing her aura and learn various minor tricks regarding practical application of chemistry… Even if she hardly needs the help."

"True, true… Speaking of, do you think I could give you aura? Technically, you do have a pseudo-soul at least, so it should be possible in theory at least."

"I believe there is a proverb regarding situations just like these," the book says drily, golden skulls' eyes narrowing somehow. "'Only one way to find out'. While we are at it, however, I would like to direct your attention toward-"

You pick up and tap a finger on the Necronomicon, a faded sheen washing over it before disappearing. "Huh, it worked. You were saying?"

"… As I was saying, you may wish to consider studying demonology in further depth, Gabriel. From the memories I inherited from my constituent parts I can surmise that stereotypically, there is some way to seal demons away into physical objects using some systemic approaches to magic. I am not aware if this is an extension of your ability to manipulate their essences or if it a separate ability entirely, but given the way your particular magic functions, I reckon it should be possible."

"Mhm, except on the face of it, there's not much use in that when I can typically either just dispose of a given demon or use their essences already," you point out.

"Indeed. However, imagine doing this and sealing demons onto paper… Paper that I should be able to assimilate to keep them prisoner until such a time they become of use."

You slide a finger along the Necronomicon's pages made of human flesh and skin, deep in thought already. "Having a bunch of demon on call would be good for a practical joke, if nothing else… Or a distraction." You haven't forgotten your humble origins and are still well aware of the uses of a quick and easy way to make enemies deal with something that is not you for a moment so you can disappear into the shadows, literally. "Might be one of those little practical tricks I have to work out outside of spells, too, like I do when I engineer things. I should probably look into it."

"Do so. In the meantime, unless you need anything more, I believe I shall be resting until such a time my services are needed once more." With a click and a clack, the skulls all go back to their normal positions, the Necronomicon demonstratively entering standby.

Funny little guy. As if you aren't going to have it work over Minutemen in entire batches soon enough anyway.


Piper Wright had to resist the urge to hum as she went about her day, the news actually being good for once and everything just feeling lighter and easier than it did a week ago.

Mayor McDonough had what seemed like a complete change of heart and normally, she would be extremely suspicious of anything like that on principle, but despite her healthy sense of scepticism she had found out why and how exactly everything had happened, especially once the mayor actually reached out to her to ask her to print a newspaper article about the upcoming crisis.

Like the hunky stranger, Gabriel, had said, he'd seen the man to talk about an offer from the Minutemen out north; they were back and wanted to reach out, to help out with the city's defense and include it in the new trading network slowly spreading from Concord which was quickly becoming a city in itself.

So many news and only some of them were bad. Was it any fault of Piper's that she piped up lately? Though the hours of hot, sweaty sex with any girl's dream man did help, too.

Seriously, she'd been maybe a bit forward, but he didn't mind, right? He'd gone along with it and he'd probably hit her up again if he was in town.

Mayor McDonough had given a big speech with all the bells and whistles at the marketplace to announce the Minutemen's presence half an hour before men and women armed these laser muskets some people still remembered from the good old days had come in, setting up a building of their own and some of them going out of their way to help fix the problems Piper had been writing about. That said, now she was back at her terminal typing up a whole new issue of Publick Occurrences.

The history of the Minutemen and how they'd been marginalized before rising again in their new form, though as much as she'd tried interviewing them there were some details she was sure she didn't have- their weapons and all the robots they used for everything came from a place they called 'Sanctuary', but that was all she'd gotten out of them directly.

Her intuition was telling her Gabriel was connected to all of this, somehow; he didn't seem to be an 'official' member, but he did come to negotiate with the mayor on behalf of the organization as a whole and could organize cooperation like Piper was seeing within days or even hours.

The new fresh water handed out near the market tasted better than the crap they usually drank down there and it was clear of any poisons according to the doc and the weirdos in the 'lab'. The stable electricity was nice, too; they had the old fusion reactor, but the lines were pretty faulty sometimes so parts of the city didn't get electricity for a couple hours before someone figured out the problem and fixed it.

Still more immediately important was the Brotherhood of Steel. Piper was supposed to write an article about it and how it operated, so she'd need to interview a couple traders that came from outside the Commonwealth and, if possible, had firsthand experience with the group- as it was, the most the average person around the city knew was that they used power armor and robbed people for technology.

Not very nuanced, though it could certainly be that was all there was to it in reality. She'd need to get in touch with Nick, maybe-

"Piper?" She blinked, her streaming thoughts superseded by the voice of her little sister. She hadn't heard her approach at all.

"Hey Nat, anything wrong? Papers doing okay?" She really shouldn't be so eager to help Piper distribute the newspaper every day, but at least she went to school with all the other kids. She still worried, though.

"Mmm, I was curious… What were you doing yesterday evening after you asked if I was busy?"

Piper broke out in a cold sweat. "Oh, um, nothing big. Just some of the usual. Why're you asking?"

"Hmmmmm…" Nat was giving her the look. "I saw a man around that time who looked like he might've come out of here, so I wanted to be sure. What if some dangerous person is aiming for us?"

Piper's cold sweat intensified. "That was, uh, Gabriel, he was a friend of a friend, you know how reporters are, hahaha."

"It also smelled a little weird when I came back and you were sleeping on the couch, you never do that. Except for this one time you were acting weird and this man was there."

Piper let out a silent prayer, figuring she could use any and all divine providence available here. Nat was just as bad as herself when it came to finding out secrets, but she could never, ever tell her sweet, innocent sister what she'd invited Gabriel in for.


Recreational torture by way of extracting something useful from the wastes of skin you've imprisoned besides blood never fails to bring a smile to your face, just as figuring out that one trick or snag that's all between you and (even) greater phenomenal cosmic power or having sex does. It's just those things that trigger the 'reward' responses inside what passes for your brain- as a vampire you don't really use it to think of course and hormones and such crap are entirely beneath you, but even without the rush of endorphins you can still enjoy these little things in life.

Other things you enjoy like that would be stealing important or useful things (you might be a mild latent kleptomaniac, come to think of it), brutalizing enemies and, of course, having a big, happy family you can feel good about.

There's a reason you frequently go to bother the vampires you count among this number. They understand it, too, which is why they're always happy about it. Even and especially Taylor and she's never happy!

That said, your usual happy fun times aside, you still have a whole wasteland to explore (kinda). It's not so much that you need to do this, but it is kind of fun to just go out and see what Earth Fallout has to show you, especially when you can get some actual loot and perhaps even new technology to analyze for your own ends.

The holograms were a surprise, but a welcome one. Just goes to show that unless you go out of your way to cheat with magic, you never know what unlife throws at you!

… Note to self, cheat with magic to find stuff more regularly. The whole orichalcum thing was incredibly cool at the time and it will forever stay in your memory, not to mention everything else you found and found out while at it.

Which brings you to your next target in turn. General Atomics Galleria, a sort of theme park meant to showcase how a shopping district run entirely by the company's (General Atomics') robots would look and feel like according to what you know. Quite a ways north of Malden, but teleportation, as always, makes travel a non-issue.

So there you stand in the air with your weight reduced to nearly nothing and using your esper power to orient and move yourself, looking at the thing.

It's not much, but let's see where this will go.


The place is quiet and abandoned, not that you expected otherwise; quietly, a bunch of robots is hovering in place, Mister Handys and Mister Gutsies (the militarized version of the standard model, or maybe it's the other way around, both are entirely possible) manning the shops and acting as guards.

The buildings are, obviously and easily visible, arranged in a circle around the giant Mister Handy statue in the middle of a plaza of sorts and, as you quickly find out when you approach, the statue is actually a small tower made to look like one of the robots.

There's also a bunch of skeletons all around, but those are quite likely unimportant; just people that died when the blasts went off. The facilities all around are most likely not terribly immediately important, just a couple of general Earth Fallout places- a gym, a bakery, a 'Slocum Joe's', a Fallons Department Store, so you make your way inside the tower, taking a surprisingly still functioning elevator up and inside of it.

Stepping out inside a sort of control room, you're accosted by what seems to be its only resident. "Please identify yourself," it politely demands in the typical Mister handy voice.


"I have a better idea," you state and flare out your aura, drawing out some of the energy your soul clouds itself with and forming it like clay into the shape of the minion you wish to call upon.

Within moments, Hack has arrived, the giggling and googly-eyed girl with nonhuman additions in pink, blue and yellow jumping into the robot as a wild swirl of color without delay.

"Hoooooooooh!" She makes with the Mister Handy's speakers twisted to generate her voice. "Lemme read through the memory databanks… This botty's been a bad boy! A bad, bad boy!"

"What'd it do?" You ask with some mild curiosity.

"Killed the last sucker they sent to oversee this claptrap. His body's lying somewhere in the corner over there," your minion explains with a gesture of a robotic appendage. "They were s'posed to send a new one to install a firmware update to keep the robots from killing people, but he never came so this shitheap was kept on sleepy mode since then."

"Huh, neat. Any chance we can just shut them all down?"

"Terminal's right there. In the control tower. This ain't your first time doing this, chief."


A quick look over yet another terminal (once again you feel the uncanny need to take a shower after just touching such a primitive, worthless computing device) is all it takes for you to find the 'turn everything off' option and activate it, subsequently permanently shutting down all the robots in this place.

"Alright, guess I'll just mark this location for salvage and potential rebuilding, I suppose," you note with mild disappointment. You didn't expect the General Atomics Galleria to harbor any mouthwatering secrets or extremely powerful tech, but it would have been nice to get something actually interesting as opposed to just a bunch of robots on standby.

"Oh, don't be a pottyshot, this place is great!" It is extremely disturbing to see a Mister Handy with the voice and body language of a manic young girl, but somehow Hack pulls it off. "You get yer own theme park, just fill it up with blackjack and hookers and it's gunna be greaaaat!"

"Not sure how many customers a theme park would attract with this location," you snort. "Maybe an idea for later."

"You better believe it! It's my idea so it's au-teh-matically great!"


One thing quite close to General Atomics Galleria (a name you may or may not need to change at some point) is a rather large body of water, one Lake Quannapowitt.

… How the hell people came up with these names is beyond you, but hey, whatever rustles their jimmies, you guess. None of your business at any rate. What is, however, is the lake itself, disregarding its name.

As someone invested in the mirelurk ranching business to an extent, any watery location is of interest to you, naturally, and so you go ahead and check this one out with the sun rising at your back. And indeed the lake is rich in the life signs of a whole bunch of things, your enhanced senses picking up mirelurks, bloodbugs, bloatflies and more vermin all around the water.

Which is also slightly green.

"Whazzdis, they throw a reactor in there? This body's reading, like, super high rads values from the water. This is da GOAT."

"Look, Hack, I don't get half your references and you're literally made from my subconscious. I don't think this level of 'humour' is sustainable for you." Yes, Hack is still piloting her current Mister Handy body. Yes, it is still very weird, not that you particularly care.

"Boooh. Anyway, I don't think taking a swim would be good even for you. Might just met your skin off through yer aura!"

"Could be," you shrug, walking closer towards the lake. "The bugs seem to like it, though. Not sure it would be safe to build a ranch here, good minions are a pain to get and a single accident could kill them."

"Wanna take a look 'round? Might be somethin' interestin' nearby!" Having inhabited this robot for a little while, Hack already has got it modified to her testes, meaning she can randomly rotate the eyes, main parts and lower robotic arms independently of each other.

"Sure, why not."

A cursory search yields little beyond a couple of casually massacred pieces of wildlife that just can't seem to get a hint (Mirelurks are hilariously easy to kill with a good punch straight into their heads), at least until you enter what seems to be some kind of permanent monitoring station for the lake. Aside from an ad for some kind of fishing contest, you also do pick up a rather amusing note that seems to have survived the centuries more or less intact.

"Now I just gotta see this," you mumble to yourself and turn on the terminal, curious to see whether anyone actually had the time to follow these instructions.

Lake Quannapowitt Monitoring Station

Massachusetts Department of Natural Reources

Water Quality Monitoring System

Your quarterly inspection is 10976 week(s) overdue, ADMINISTRATOR.

Looking good so far.

Current water quality, according to the somehow still functioning instruments linked to this thing, seems to be doing rather… unwell, not that you expected anything else. It is visibly tinted with a mild green glow, for fuck's sake.

Current Water Quality Status:

- Radioactive Contaminants: Extreme

- Heavy Metal Contaminants: Extreme

- Fecal Contaminants: Extreme

- Dissolved Oxygen: Moderate

- Other Contaminants: Extreme

- Overall Status: Hazardous - See Alerts

--*ALERT*--

Contaminants in excess of sensor tolerance.

--*ALERT*--

Critical levels of multiple contaminants have been detected. Contact with this water may be hazardous to human health.

However, the most interesting thing is what you find in the 'reports' section once you accidentally log out once and have to fiddle around a little to get back inside- look, you don't demand extremely user-friendly UI here, but a few quality of life considerations could have been taken at some damn point, really.

6/1/77

Quarterly water quality assessment. Contaminant levels three times prior readings. Illegal dumping remains the most likely cause.

Recommend closing the lake to the public and beginning a formal inquiry into the waste management practices of nearby heavy industry

So far, so good, but judging by the boats outside, they didn't actually close the lake to the public, now did they?

6/25/77

Repeated water quality assessment per department request. Contaminant levels have continued to increase.

Recommended closing the lake, beginning formal inquiry, canceling the mayor's fishing tournament.

Oh. You see where this is going and it's already hilarious.

7/4/77

Fishing tournament resulted in 27 reports of serious illness following contact with the water. One boat sank; its two surviving crew members were treated for critical radiation burns. No fish caught.

Lake Quannapowitt closed to the public until further notice.

You know, this is probably the kind of shit that caused mirelurks, in retrospect, as well as all the other weird shit out in the oceans. They just dumped industrial radioactive waste literally everywhere and since radiation seems to work somehow differently in this dimension, marine life just mutated into enormous cancer crabs that absorbed a bunch of other shellfish all over the place into their own highly morphologically varied species. Somehow.

If you were capable of having a headache, their biology would be giving you one.

Anyway, as for the lake itself. it could be usable, you guess… Though the soft, craggy ground around it doesn't inspire much confidence in you. Might need to find a better way to keep mirelurks from just digging themselves out through the ground if you want to use this lake as another ranch. Then again, a solid foundation of something they can't get through might be enough already, all that would need some work would be installing it.

Good thing you made Bobs waterproof, you suppose.

"Hey! HEEEEY! Look at this catch!"

You look. Hack seems to be using a dismembered mirelurk leg to fish for more mirelurks from within the lake, floating above it and trying to drag it up now that's caught onto something.

You suppress the urge to sigh.


A little way north of what remains of Lexington, there is an old landfill you decide to scout out next. You're looking into establishing an air presence which would make an airfield or something pretty nice; especially considering Lexington's position making it relatively easy to reach most areas around the Commonwealth from it when going by air.

Unfortunately, when you arrive, you find yourself hard-pressed to breathe at all. Which is why you stop doing so, hurray for undeath once again.

This whole place? It fucking stinks. It stinks to the high heavens. It stinks so much you can't help but compare it to some of the worst smells you've had to experience in your unlife.

Ugh, and it's also infested with molerats, the naked giant rodents frolicking through the trash they're burrowing into. Your stomach really, really isn't weak after all you've been through, but even so, you have to say this place is quite disgusting on an objective level.

Yeah, you probably aren't getting anything out of this trashheap. Not without killing everything in it with fire for a good long while, at least; you'd be willing to bet there are some bacteria deeper down that should never see the light of day outside of very controlled circumstances.


It's probably a little early to be harvesting more soul fragments from your meal tickets again, but you want to get them used to this treatment as soon as possible; after all, if they're reduced to sobbing, incoherent wrecks, they can't try to escape, even if their current accommodations are enough to minimize that risk just fine.

However, you're also making sure everyone else is aware of the Necronomicon and its abilities and uses. Somewhat predictably, Taylor is the first to seek out its use, followed by your other vampires and thralls before it goes out to Concord where it is meant to prepare you a bunch of pilots for your bullhead fleet.

Thanks to that advantageous trade you arranged, you have… quite a few of those after latest events. Couple dozen as of right now, including the weaponry and completely insane flight capabilities that are Lutece particles combined with more conventional thrusters as the original used and you kind of crappily imitated.

"I wish to make it known that I resent being used as a cheap mass production tool as opposed to a valued member of this team," the book lets you know snottily.

"Please, you know what you were created for," you respond with a roll of your eyes. "You don't actually mind."

"Mhm… I believe I have found the answer to an old question of mankind's. If one can meet their god and creator, doing so of their own free will is one objectively bad idea."

You suppress a snort of laughter. "Not wrong there. Actually, do you really think I could do well declaring myself a god or is that just a reference to our factual relationship here?"

"Let me give you a comprehensive answer. Yes." The golden skeleton on the Necronomicon's spine raises its sword into the air. "Your powers are factually god-like from the perspective of a simple human being. Nothing speaks against letting your obvious megalomania control you even more than it already does."

"Funny, I don't feel like cackling maniacally and proclaiming myself the greatest over here," you note with a raised eyebrow.

"And yet you are aiming to take complete control over all the worlds you have been in, sans the mere day trips, in fact if not in name. Be circumspect all you wish, but we both know who you really are, Gabriel."

"Well, not wrong." You shrug, but really, that's all you can say about that.

The book's not exactly wrong.


Taylor closed her eyes, going over the changes that had taken place behind them one more time. She had to suppress the urge to just lie down in her room in Sanctuary, but that was alright- she could be as stubborn as she needed to, the Necronomicon's strange torpor be damned.

When she'd been given the choice between the many practical skills Gabriel had, Taylor had needed to study them in depth, a task the strange book made of human skin and flesh bound in gold had been helpful with for all that it grumbled to itself the entire time. Ultimately, she'd drawn her options out between what seemed the most useful to her and asked it for its advice.

Which brought her where she was, then, slowly assimilating new knowledge and muscle memory imparted upon her. Walden Pond used to be some minor tourist trap crossed with a weekend trip destination, but there was little of that left- just an old, rickety souvenir shop with a locked door and…

And some drainage pipes leading to the sewers. Within which she could feel three living humans, matching the descriptions she'd been given.

Laying a hand onto a wall that'd weathered nuclear blasts and two hundred years of the elements beating down on it, Taylor concentrated, taking a deep breath. She followed the grooves she'd never carved, stirring the invisible energy that filled her with strength at all times and pushed.

Her aura surged and amplified the force of her movement, just as she knew it would. The material she was touching went flying, torn away by the power pressing against it, and so she easily made her way inside.

There was another door with a note pinned to it with a knife. Taylor rolled her eyes; they were literally letting anyone that came in know where they were hiding.

The door didn't fare any better than the wall. A loud crash heralded her entrance, a layer of flies and cockroaches and miscellaneous bugs covering her from head to toe.

"The fuck was- that. Ah shit. Ah SHIIIIIIIT!"

She was upon the first raider with a single step, driving her fist into his solar plexus to make him flinch, then lowering her body to put all of her weight into an uppercut that immediately snapped his neck.

… She hastily rushed to drink his blood before it was too late- wasting a single soul was too good of a fate. For them. Even as she drank her fill and felt the approach of other raiders coming towards the sewer access in the souvenir shop's basement, she reconsidered just how deadly correctly applied bare hands could be with super strength in the mix.

She had to actively fight the urge to use her fingers like Gabriel would have done, her relative lack of claws intended as of the moment. That said, she'd technically tried it like this already, so…

The other two raiders fared no better against Taylor's pincer-claws, transformed partially like those of a mirelurk queen's on one hand and the mandibles of several spiders on the other, and the very thin wire made from an unexpectedly useful experiment's silk.

The mirelurks outside were already eaten by her before she ever came in, which made Walden Pond a perfectly suitable and already cleared out location for another farm for them. All that remained was to let someone know while she went on to find more test subjects.

… She wondered if Gabriel would be happy about this. He probably would be, he'd been looking into this kind of thing lately, but…

It couldn't be helped. Being praised and lavished with attention (and 'attention') was wonderful, after all. And soon, once she finished 'digesting' her new knowledge, she could even help him when he was building something!

With hundreds of arm to make work go faster and save time for other activities Gabriel should be doing instead. Such as herself.


Okay, the artillery you could have mass-produced with your current material wealth would, undoubtedly, be fearsome enough to give any invading force pause, whether by land, sea or air, but that doesn't mean you can't improve on it as it stands and then use the last few days to frantically get your preparations in order.

Just like college. Or school. Or… Well, hey, your lifestyle has never lent itself to letting you just prioritize what you should at any one time. It happens.

So you go ahead and sketch up the actual blueprints once again to help you visualize how the mortars (that's what they ultimately are, really) function and what you could change where, what changes result in what other changes and so on.

It's never easy to change just a single part of a greater whole; if you want things to work right, you need to consider how everything plays together and-

"I believe I have found a threat to public safety. If there was any justice in the world, I would alarm the authorities."

You glance at Jezebel who's just come to join you. You know damn well she specifically came to find you. "If you want to be railed up the ass again, you just need to say so."

"Such disgraceful depravity. You cannot be allowed to-" You stretch out a hand to grab her telekinetically, drawing her in and positioning her. "Fiend! Rapist! Ra- AaaAaaAaaAaa!"

Finally you can work in peace. And get your mind off your constant state of arousal while everyone you'd usually have sex with is busy elsewhere and you don't want to bother them.


Upgrades

3 Points: Custom Payloads: Normally these things just fire explosives on an area, but with a few optional changes to the firing mechanism, you could let them handle a few more exotic payloads… made with Alchemy

4 Points: Triple Barrel: A pretty big redesign, using three barrels per artillery piece would allow you to have them fire at roughly triple the normal rate, dispensing even more firepower over a given area

1 Point: Waterproofing: The new more delicate parts require a level of sophistication that… Okay, for real, you've made changes and the artillery isn't as rugged as it used to be, may as well ensure they don't jam up at the worst of times.

3 Points: Delivery: You have robots. Very large ones. You also have lots of big artillery pieces. Why not… combine the two? Just a mobile platform that can weather the recoil and move around a lot more easily with the artillery mounted on it.


"Cakey!"

She shakes her head.

"Cupples?"

Another shake, hesitant this time.

"How about… Cappy?"

"Gah! Okay, just tell me what you want!" Cupcake's been sulking over you calling her names, though even so you're pretty sure she's just doing it for the attention. That's just how she ticks.

"Oh, I wanted to look into making a bunch of that rust pulver to literally rust enemy aircraft out of the sky," you explain. "And since you're permanently idle anyway…"

"I'm not idle, I've been working! Hard!" Your mocking smile doesn't seem to inspire agreement. "Just ask Nolac! I've been making better drugs with her! Him! Whatever!"

… Okay, that is potentially really bad, but let's just assume nothing catastrophic will happen and hope for the best. "I see. So how about alchemy then, have you been advancing that in any way?"

"Du-uh! Where d'you think my new and improved Killdeath Superdie Punchbrew Nine-Thousand came from?" Withdrawing something from inside of her pocket, Cupcake hols up a vial of a frothing, wildly moving red-brown fluid. "Just one sip and-"

And it falls through her fingers, no amount of floundering able to save the sample of the stuff. You look on, bemused, as it hits the ground… And proceeds to smoke and roil in place, the potion squirming like a living being as it tries to draw itself out of the shattered glass and upwards before, finally, lying still when the evaporation seems to kill it.

"… You know, I think I should have a look at your watcher robot. That I made specifically to watch you. So things like this don't happen. Where is it, anyway?"

"Ahahahahaha, funny story that…" Oh, you feel the phantom headache come already.

You finally find the many-armed robotic companion inside a maintenance closet you included into Vault 111's floor plans mostly for style points and to have some useful stuff that just comes in handy on hand… And for things the Bobs may find useful.

It is currently missing most of its robotic limbs, twitching as it floats in place.

"Okay that's it, you're on rust pulver duty until further notice."

"It wasn't me!" You look at Cupcake, staring her down with one eyebrow raised. "It wasn't my fault!" She modulates.

You keep on staring.

"It was kind of not my fault?"

Some just don't know when to fold 'em.


Well, thankfully not everyone is as useless as an unwatched Cupcake, so you have Taylor to thank for bringing yet another lake well-suited for your mirelurk ranching activities (well, 'your', you're just making other people set the ranches up in your place) to your attention.

And she cleared it out, of course. She kind of has a tendency to do that, you've noticed.

Anyway, with your 'youngest' vampire distinguishing herself in a way that actually matters to you a little, it seems the others have also begun to care about the state of your current operations- or maybe they've just decided they want to help out as a way to entertain themselves, you aren't sure.

Nor do you care all that much. Kate and Nora are eager to spend more time with you and that's more than enough to make you happy.

Hence why you and the former are currently nearing the site of a crashed plane that's apparently just been sitting there ever since the bombs fell. It's somewhat of a renown spot as, apparently, a lot of fights happen in and around the wreck.

Scavengers, super mutants, ghouls and, of course, raiders of every stripe just so happen to find themselves near it. A convenient crossroad in the wilds, essentially, so different groups just tend to clash.

Not that it matters to you. Oh, sure, you can hear the sound of gunfire as you approach, the guttural shouting of the green-skinned mutants swinging through the air with it, but a quick bit of murder should take care of them.

"Hey Gabe, want to get kinky?"

… Except you brought your own distraction with you. "Uh, generally yes, but I'm not sure now's the right time."

"See that hill over there?" You do, it's pretty much just a rocky outcropping jutting into the air next to the site of battle. "We can get up there, fuck like rabbits and shoot anything below us."

"Oh, admit it, this is just your fetish for guns again," you roll your eyes with a small smile.

"It totally is. I still wanna do the freaky."


Kate is a sight to behold as she tears off her clothes, her customary tank top and dark pants hitting the ground in unison with your own generic clothes just bland enough to fit in with the wasteland's customs. Her smirk doesn't leave her face for even a single moment, eyes shining brilliantly in anticipation of what you're about to do together.

As of right now you're hidden behind a few crates that seemed to have been loaded onto the wrecked flight, but that's mostly because you don't expect Kate to be quiet once you both get naked… And of course, shimmying out of her clothes means she's taking out her backup weapon before she gets rid of her underwear, too.

"Can't wait to join in on the fun," she tells you while unclasping her tactical bra replacement you remember her owning way back when she first met you. "Does this count as an orgy?"

"Not sure, actually. They won't get any fun out of it, after all," you nod towards the fighting.

Both of you chuckle as you finish undressing, the sheer, thin garment masquerading as Kate's panties coming undone like the rest of her clothes.

Looking at her, your girlfriend (Does the term still apply?) is still drop-dead gorgeous to anyone with eyes worthy of being called such. Muscular, but not in that painfully artificial bodybuilder way, just natural muscles built through a life that requires regular application of lethal force, her legs long and if anything even more well-rounded than her arms.

Every time you see her butt you can't help but want to squeeze it to see how much muscle is in there.

Her swirling tattoo over her right shoulder and upper arm is just enough to be nice and accentuate the curves of her muscles instead of being too blaring and distracting, while her full breasts and pink nipples are everything you could ever want from a chest.

Also, her reddish-brown hair is as silky and soft as always. It's almost surprising how much care she used to put into it before going vamp.

She stretches out a hand, so you grasp it with your own. "Ready to go, big boy?" She leers at your crotch.

You twitch it in response by flexing your waist. "For you? Always."

You didn't mention her soft, rosy petals always covered in a thin layer of wetness every time you see them yet, did you? Because, you consider as Kate bites the corner of her lip, they also do add to her appeal as a woman.

A lot.

Both of you are supernaturally strong, so you quickly ascend upon the barren, rocky hill she pointed out to you earlier, completely naked and only carrying your weapons on you, Last Embrace and her modular gun, respectively. A quick glance lets you know there's supermutants fighting both ghouls and raiders at the moment, the former looking like they're winning courtesy of their sheer capacity to take a dozen bullets in the head and keep going.

From a cheaper gun, anyway. High-calibre shots are a different story altogether.

You're still holding hands so, with your minds almost melting into one another over your telepathy, you pull each other close, lips meeting lips and hot, wet tongues extending to wrestle with each other. Kate is an aggressive kisser, always on the attack and trying to get deeper into your mouth even if you push her back into hers; the contest seems to be one of the best parts about this, to her.

Before long, your free hand is grabbing her ass, lifting her up until she hops along with the motion and wraps her legs around your waist. Her midriff presses against yours for a long moment, both of you entwined in one another, then she releases your kiss to look over to the side.

"You think any of them are gonna notice us?"

"Doubt it," you grin. "They're too busy killing each other."

Just then, a pair of ghouls downs a raider only to be moved down by a mutant wielding a plank of wood like a club, the big green creature smashing them to paste with abandon. Kate shivers, her wet pussy rubbing against the length of your cock trapped between you, then she rubs herself against you as a whole.

"Not sure I can wait much longer…"

"Oh? Are we drawing this out on purpose?"

"You're right, let's GO!" Hoisting herself up, Kate pushes herself onto your cock, wet tightness enveloping your entire manhood in one smooth go all the while your vampire girlfriend raises her gun, blasting off a supermutant's head with one shot before she pushes her chest against yours to grin at you from below.

You just grope her butt in response, massaging the globes hiding their hardness under a soft outside layer. You can feel her fleshy walls pulsing around you, her womb jut barely kissing your manhood just as you bend your head to kiss her forehead.

Then you raise an arm to operate Last Embrace, your gauntlet firing off a projectile that kills two supermutants at once, penetrating their chests and tearing them apart with its force.

"Oh, now it's on!" Like that, you and Kate make it a contest to shoot as many targets down as you can, your lover bouncing in your grasp like a woman possessed all the while. You drag her along your entire length as many times as you can, lavishing her with pleasure and 'fun' as much as you can; in unspoken agreement, neither of you is allowed to come until all the enemies are dead.

A bit of rearranging and tilting has you nibble on her tits, though, Kate's puffy nipples tasting almost sweet when you suck them into your mouth. She gasps appreciatively, fingers clawing along your back when she isn't busy shooting something in the head.

Every time another body is blown up by your combined fire, she clenches deeply around you, licking her lips in tune with the ending of lives. Finally, as the last surviving raider dies, killed by a bullet from both you and her, she comes, shuddering in completion and dragging you over the edge with her as well.

Caught in the velvety prison of Kate's pussy, you pump out shot after shot of cum, giving her pouty lips one last kiss before you're done. Both of you are breathing heavily despite not ever needing to when you let her down, just standing there in the open.

She's beautiful. She always is, but even more so now, coming down off the high and your cum dribbling from her tight pussy down onto her thighs.

Then both of you stop, the approach of several new blood signatures signaling more shooting to come. "Guess we'll do a second round?" You ask.

"You bet. Hey, wanna do my ass this time?"

"Do I ever."

"Heh." She holds up a fist, so you bump yours into hers before she turns around, happily getting on her toes so you can press your cockhead, slick with both your fluids, against her asshole, slowly spreading it open and making her groan and grunt as the next targets wander into sight.

Suffice to say neither of you are getting off that rock for a while yet. Oh, and you also end up giving her a true soul you figured work well with her powers… After you're done, that is, you aren't handing her an easy win like a bullet teleport aimhack a moment before.


"Haha, haaaahahahahahah, mwahahahahahahaha!"

"You can't! This technology is too dangerous to be released into the world!"

"Please, what's the worst that can happen?"

Yoshi flinches, glaring at you. "You know damn well what it means when you, of all people, tell Murphy to get it on already."

"Oh c'mon, it's just some adaptive virtual intelligence, not even the real thing categorically speaking."

"The difference is paper thin when you give it this much potential to freely develop itself!"

"Even it it manages to gain sapience one day, so what? Wouldn't be the first time one of my creations did."

Just then the doors to the laboratory open, revealing several row of chanting cultist souls that managed to find themselves some dark robes somehow. ""Fons misericordiae diluet mundum.""

Yoshi points towards them.

""Misericordia dei superabit mortalitatem.""

You scowl. "Please, how likely is it this machine will start to chant in Latin of all things?"


Self-Advancing: Manufactories can modify themselves autonomously within some specific parameters depending on what tasks they are given, eventually enhancing production efficiency and speed on their own through simple augmentation cycles modeled after evolutionary processes, selecting for advantageous changes to their tool sets.


Father Simon Wales nodded to himself, stroking his fully restored beard as he considered the words he was writing. Adding a chapter to the holy book or, much as he was afraid of admitting it due to the enormity of the concept, writing a wholly new bible, was a task so serious he found himself stumped on just how to put the wisdom and knowledge required to know the Face of God into something as simple and easily confused as the written word.

He was writing by hand, too, of course. He believed God would not mind if he used more modern methods- including those invented far beyond his own time on the mortal coil- but he liked to think he was expressing just a trace of his sincerity through his current methods.

And there was so much to be written down! The old books were horrendously outdated and corrupted, his own knowledge was fractured at best but still far closer to the truth than the old bible had ever been. What else could he do, as an adherent to the Lord, than to let others discover the scant fragments of the Truth he was aware of.

A great many traditionalist views he had known others to hold and had, indeed, held himself before the Grace of Mercy were simply not relevant nor good, in many cases outright contrary to His will. Hence Simon did what he could to set the record straight, to add up the sum of what he could say with certainty into a gathered body of work.

The study of the world was a virtue, for through knowing of His creation could man know the love of his creator. It was folly to be afraid of the wonders of science, just as it was to blindly follow it; a carefully measured, but open approach was what one needed to take. It was obvious in hindsight, but too easily was man led astray by petty fright or preconceptions, unwilling or incapable to accept the world for what it was.

If it was possible, if it was part of the world, did not the Lord create it? if the Lord did create it, was it not Good?

Miracles were not something one could expect, for even faded as the Mercy of the Lord was (more thoughts on this were gathered in the book of Genesis, which Simon would keep separate until he could confirm or deny what he assumed as to the state of the world and its original creation), for all that He did what he could, man was foolish as was one's fellow man- aside them who were directly guided to paradise, one's fate was their own to choose. Where it led was unknown, the dark waters of uncertainty clouding the future, but as it stood, one had to make their own miracles.

Some were lucky enough to do so by moving the Lord into action, some merely stumbled unto their golden opportunities. Most, however, were on their own, and they should neither be pitied nor be looked down on for their lives.

Death was an ending, outside of paradise. Simon was well aware and had peruse the divine scrolls on the state of the world: Where once, perhaps, heaven awaited all that crossed past the pearly gates, now Paradise was what a chosen few had to look forward to. All else… Were cast unto the beyond, to be destroyed and remade eternally until such a time that they found their way to the Lord.

It had been this way for a long, long time, cosmic spans of it. It was only recently that God descended to or perhaps rejoined the mortal realm.

The Will of the Lord was mysterious and tangled, such wisdom and far-reaching thought encompassed in it that mere mortal souls such as himself could barely begin to comprehend it, yet it shall be known that it existed and a grand design was awaiting them all. Perhaps… perhaps one day all of humanity would be united astride the pockets of Paradise, but such a time was far-off if it existed and he dared only to write of it in whispers of what could be.

Homosexuality, something that would have had him recoil in his time on the mortal coil, was now just what it was- an expression of love and of lust, both of which were entirely acceptable. Natural urges need not be punished nor encouraged, merely accepted for what they were.

Similarly, lust and love could be separated easily, yet often found themselves surging in the presence of one another. The old Christian aversion to sex before marriage, the insistence of abstinence and revulsion to free love were a relic of a past that simply did not matter. The Lord walked among them and he freely made love with the same ease with which he shared the Grace of Mercy and none of them, no man, woman nor child, should not be able to follow His example if they so wished.

Now, the topic of rape was another story and a much more complicated one, but the final conclusion Simon came to after perusing the respective scrolls and books and anecdotes was that as long as it was an unbeliever and they 'had hearts in their eye', to paraphrase the Lord's own stance, it was generally acceptable.

Nearly all taboos of the old humanity had to be cast aside, just so they did not get in the way of His Will. That said, incest was still something to be avoided over successive generations if at all possible, with technology to correct genetic deviations from what one would consider acceptable advisable. He spent a dozen pages on it so far, though he would probably return to this particular theme in time.

To help one another was still a golden standard, however, for this Truth, at least, held true. When your fellow was in need, it was obvious and natural to help them; when you were in need, it was obvious and natural to accept any help one was offered.

And if another struck one's cheek, it was only natural to beat him half to death and knock out their teeth. If one was forgiving and understanding, they may not do so and this, too, was a virtue, but if they were not, nobody could expect them to.

Father Simon Wales checked whether the metal feather he was using to write had enough ink on it before he continued when the door to his humble abode, merely a simple room near the equally humble cathedral he had built with his bare hands, burst open. "Father Wales! We were graced with His presence!"

"Hallelujah!" He exclaimed spontaneously, flattening his simple robes as he stood up. "What did He do or want?"

"Brothers and Sisters, I believe I need not tell you why he have gathered here today. Our Lord hath appeared once again, granting us the gift of his incandescent presence!" Father Wales waited for the spontaneous expressions of joy to recede before he continued. "He imbued the God Machine with His spark that it may forever continue to grow and prosper, like a seed may grow into a plant or an egg may hatch to release a living being! Hallelujah!"

""Hallelujah!""

Many may doubt whether meeting one's God and Creator may not be a doubtful pleasure, but Simon did know better, as did his flock. Knowing the Lord was there, cradling them safely in his stomach, did wonders for the common man's (and woman's) enthusiasm for the preaching of even simple, barely aware men of faith like himelf.

Belief was to believe God existed and watched over them. Faith was to know it.

That said, he also still had other duties to adjudicate over. Clearing his throat, Father Wales continued on. "It is also my pleasure and privilege to announce several marriages on this fateful day in Paradise. Thrice will we, as a community, wed two people sworn to spend eternity or at least a part of it together and once will we add a hopeful aspirant to the nine that make up the largest married group within our slice of Wonderland at this time. Please, come up to me here, all of you, and we can begin."

Marriages were always a joyful occasion. Some had balked at first when he had proclaimed clearly that polyamory was an accepted model of life within the denomination of the Church of Mercy, but seeing them all happy together was an argument few could counter. Father Wales had made sure to talk to them all about it beforehand, of course, but as long as they were sure they wished to live together as they did and had tried it out before making it 'official' with him, there was little he would do other than give his blessings to any that wished for them.

He also did manage the marriage register, one of the few registers of the souls granted the Grace of Mercy within Paradise. It was a minor point of pride for him, even as he was aware that many of these marriages would fall apart over time. An eternal life did not suit itself for lifelong commitments, but for however long it lasted, happiness was to be cherished and encouraged.


Well, with all of that taken care of and Kate sufficiently satisfied for the time being (important to take care of that lest she blow up a bunch of people you actually want to keep), you're off to yet another 'idyllic' body of water just sitting somewhere within the Commonwealth.

This time though, it's a pond, as opposed to a lake. That's… more a matter of size than anything else, like, someone looked at it and went 'That ain't no lake, that's, like, a pond!' and nobody cared enough to dispute that, but yeah, here you are.

It's… just a bunch of water more or less in one place, in the end. That's all there is to it.

There's a few mirelurks in the area, but they don't really seem to breed much here, or at least you don't see any nests or eggs around. Including underwater. That means there's probably some reason they aren't, whether it is because this pond just doesn't work or there's a better one nearby or whatever.

It's probably just not polluted enough for their tastes. You know for a fact the thing breed like crazy inside of toxic and radioactive bodies of water, just to point at the ocean as an example.

Oh, and there's a smattering of raiders living inside a haphazard shack nearby. You're considering what to do with them when you notice a pungent scent in the air. Your eyes fall on a bunch of plants growing on the water's surface; you overlay Yoshi real quick to take a closer look in response.

Clusters of small, bright purple berries are growing on leafy green stems snaking through the water like a cross between climbing plants and pond leaves. Their insides are filled to the brim with what you ca only describe as a wild mix of industrial oil, toxic chemicals and a bunch of biological waste materials.

… That explains why this pond isn't super polluted, these things are feeding off of the pollution. That's neat.


Well, harvesting this newly found plant is a lot more complicated than you would've liked; the berries have a nasty tendency to slip through your fingers and the stems are surprisingly easy to rip up. And of course using your claws to avoid slipping just means it's that much easier to rip these things.

You ultimately end up just using your gravity manipulation to slowly and evenly lift whole plants out of the water. Once that's done and you have them in the air, it's much easier to pack them up as carefully rolled up balls.

"Hey ya shitwhizzle, what ya think you're-"

As is tradition by this point, you shut up a shit-talking raider by breaking his legs through increasing the weight of his knees and everything below them. The lapse in concentration of doing so almost costs you your crops, but you get it back under control in a quick moment of reaction.

Pressing the man against the ground under his own weight and listening to his muffled curses, you tilt your head. "Guess I'll go ahead and harvest you guys too while I'm here already. No need to worry, I have a lot of space in the vault."

And with that you're off to catch the other two idiots living here in the middle of nowhere.


Setting up an improvised partial miniature ecosystem isn't as easy as it sounds, though you can get it done on the fly by simply making someone else figure out the details. Namely, the employees working at your original mirelurk farm, having them lower the tarberry plants into the water on some nets you get installed real quick.

Kept out of the pens while the mirelurks are inside, the plants should hopefully prosper while keeping the pollution inside the water to a level that works for the giant mutant shellfish. Mirelurks tend to just multiply recklessly when their excrement reaches a massive level in their surroundings and while that may sound good, having half of them die because the other half grows too hungry and eats them and dozens of surplus eggs you don't know how to deal with is actually a bad thing.

Basically, to sum it up, any long-term interaction with the flora and fauna of Earth Fallout is a matter of carefully adjusting how much pollutant is in their environment and you're using these tar berries to keep it more or less steady. Oh, sure, they'll grow more berries and get out of control, but that's why you have people here to trim the plants regularly.

Yes, apparently, these things are called tarberries. Used in various drugs and for some recipes, too, apparently… You may need to outlaw putting stupidly toxic things into people's mouths at some point. Or have Preston do it, whatever.

Next up once you're done at Thicket Ranch, as some have started calling it, just a relaxed bit of tinkering with a bit of old, old hardware near an old radio tower you want to tune into sending and perpetuating your own teleportation signal.

… And a quick telepathic message lets you call in Taylor, too, to deal with the mass of bugs that have apparently decided to nest on and near it. Gotta love having flexible and useful henchmen on hand.

She's even pretty helpful when you go through the radio tower and replace deteriorated components with new bits and piece you brought, actually upgrading a few of them just because you couldn't be bothered to get equivalent pieces to the ones you're taking out.

All in all, just a bit of quick work you're making of this thing.


"Okay, there's a small army of BAT robots deployed all around the Commonwealth- they're stretched a bit thin out south, but we should know as soon as the Brotherhood arrives plus or minus an hour or two at most. Next off, let's talk about the Minutemen. How are they doing and are they ready to actually fight an opponent like the Brotherhood?"

Yes, you have repurposed Preston's office into an improvised war room. Just because you wanted to do this in Concord and all.

"The Minutemen are ready. It'll be a big difference to what they're used to, but they won't let anyone just walk over the Commonwealth like they own the place," the 'general' says with determination in his voice and steel in his spine. When'd he man up like that? "With the new laser muskets and some good planning, they'll be a match for the Brotherhood's soldiers, power armor or no power armor."

"Well, hopefully they won't need to be a match one against one. How about we step up recruitment efforts a little in the time we have left? You'll need more people to oversee the entire Commonwealth after this is over with, anyway," you suggest with a casual one-shouldered shrug.

"Sure, why not. What did you have in mind?"

What follows is a lengthy discussion on how you might motivate wastelanders and 'city folk' to join up with your organization. Preston is initially hesitant to push this whole deal too hard, but you talk him around pretty easily by pointing out how many people just need to be really made aware that there's a place for them if they just show up- a lot of people around the wastes of post-apocalyptic America don't read the newspapers or watch the news other ways, after all.

So you get to talking and spin a few ideas. Proper recruitment offices in the ground floor of the Minutemen HQ, giving officers a talk on how to approach people and stuff like that. No hard guidelines, for now; on a structural level, the Minutemen function more along the lines of a militia than anything else and you aren't necessarily looking to change that.

Also, you come up with a few designs for recruitment posters.

"I don't know, Gabriel, it's coming on a bit too strong."

"I was just trying to portray your spirit as succinctly as I could." And not really putting much effort into it, but hey, still better than most could do in a couple minutes. "How about this?"

"The colors are a bit bright, but yeah, that reads better."

"There's also the whole fight with the Brotherhood. Some places have a whole thing about not being beholden to an invading power like that."

"Yeah, folks around the Commonwealth really value their freedom. It's why the Institute's whole deal rubbed so many the wrong way."

"So how about… Something like this? Just a basic message."

"Well, it captures the concept? Maybe don't put my face on every one of them, though, I'm not sure that's how to get people interested…"

"Oh, you're doing fine, stop worrying about it," you wave Preston's concerns off. "That said, fine, let's take something else… And get a little more text in this time."

"Oh yeah, I like that one. No musket, though?"

"Don't need to put it on every one," you sarcastically point out. "Anyway, if this is good enough, let's look into printing them out and having people put them over public places, see how well they work. Worst case we lose a couple work hours and some paint."

"Oh yeah, while you're here," Preston asks, tapping onto his desk, "could you help me figure out a simple tag design for a pendant we can give our people? Just a small piece of metal, we could use the manufactory in the basement to make them, but I think it'd mean a lot to the Minutemen at large."

"Oh, sure. Let's keep it simple, though, so we don't dilute the message."

Aside from these shenanigans, you also create several Hack bodies, to be kept active by the handful of 'officers' Preston has trusted enough to grant aura to, and planned out a standard response plan for robots and walking artillery pieces to be teleported in case things become chaotic and no specific responses are available.

"Do you… Do you think I should give more people aura? I figured you wanted to keep it limited to only the trustworthier ones, but maybe having more of them would be worth it?"


"Nah, no need," you shrug casually to return the sudden self-doubt. "I trust you've thought through whose aura to unlock, so there's no need to panic at the last minute. We got this whole thing in the bag already, don't worry about it."

"I wish I was as confident as you, Gabriel," Preston sighs, shaking his head to gather his thoughts.

"No, I'm serious, we've kind of stacked a lot of advantages on our side. The Brotherhood has no idea about the absolute mayhem they're walking into while we have surprise, expendable robots and specialized firepower meant to take them out of the sky on our side. The most troubling part of this fight will be taking out the stragglers."

"… Yeah, I guess you're right. It's just… The Brotherhood is supposed to be this big deal, isn't it? It just feels weird to think of ourselves as on their level, is all."

"One thing you have to remember," you advise with a pat on his shoulder, "is that when it comes to punching someone's face in? All that it really takes is knowing what you're doing. They can be the Brotherhood of Steel or the Minutemen themselves, anyone trying to hurt them just needs the right weapons and knowledge."

"I'll keep that in mind," your loyal minion nods. "Same thing that happened at Quincy I guess. We just have to be careful."


Using your various powers in combination with one another is perhaps one of the best ways you have to gain more power overall, so you're always ready to test out how to do so. In particular, your abilities regarding gravity are actually quite interesting in how you may be able to use them, so that's what you focus on for a bit inside your Vault power testing room.

Because yes, you did have one built while you were refurbishing it. That much should go without saying, it's essentially just a big empty room with thick steel walls that are less likely to be breached than most alternatives.

No need to waste anything beyond that when you have so much perfectly usable steel thanks to the constant robotic scavenging going on within your area of influence.

So, this is a lot more complicated in theory, but you have these organic polyps you can create thanks to your Gravity Well plasmid, just popping and growing them out of your palm, and once you squeeze and throw them, they effectively act as a sort of grenade that affects gravity, pulling everything within their vicinity to themselves.

Explosively so. It's essentially an implosion, rather, but hey, anything that lets you fuck things up is a step forward.

Now leaving your esper power (which is a whole 'nother story in and of itself, it has to be said) aside, your levitation lets you ignore the effect entirely… But you do know that you can modulate your gravity-negating power to an extent, you've done it before and all. So what if you could make this work together somehow?

A couple hours of experimentation shows that hey, yes you can. You accidentally smacked yourself against your walls hard enough to deplete a bunch of aura more times than you're willing to admit, but you can actually redirect your momentum using your levitation to cruise along the sudden gravitational pull. In fact, by throwing several gravity wells in quick succession, you can move yourself around the room freely without so much as moving a finger!

It's kind of like surfing, you imagine. You never did it, but the sensation should be roughly equivalent… You think.

Now what if you were to additionally use your esper power on top to-

You rapidly smack into the walls and ceilings all over the place, forcefully reigning in your powers. Your aura breaks, ringing out with a sharp sound as it does, but negating your momentum for long enough you can drop down to the ground.

Okay, note to self, do this to other people, not yourself. At least not with a better plan next time.


Fashion in the wastelands is pretty much entirely nonexistent in any practical sense; though raiders tend to wear their rags in specific 'styles' and the more influental (and therefore those with more resources to use) have some ritualistic scarring or primitive tattoos from time to time, but overall, clothing is a matter of functionality first, last and only.

The average person can count themselves lucky when they have any decent clothing covering them enough to keep the elements off themselves already, they just don't have the time to care about making themselves look good. Kind of understandable when your life depends on performing backbreaking work all over the place, though.

That said, Concord is bringing this mentality into stark relief; with safety and shelter secured and even sustenance mostly taken care of, suddenly personal hygiene and grooming are a thing. People know exactly what it's like to be out in the wasteland and they want to make it clear that Concord isn't like the rest of the Commonwealth, so they kind of developed their own 'style' collectively.

Showers and such are a thing, too, so most people still stink to some extent, but much less so. Your enhanced senses are still offended, but they pretty much always are on some level.

Men are either shaved, at most keeping some stubble on their faces, or else bear groomed beards to make themselves look different, with short hair and some actually fitting clothing- no more bag shirts and linen pants, instead form-fitting cloth mass-produced by the manufactory you have in place to make use of scavenged cloth in general.

The women on the other hand wear simple dresses on occasion, but many still prefer the same style as men, though doing one's hair seems to be catching on once again among them. It must be some genetic thing.

Incidentally, nails are being cut short much more regularly, too, while some people (those that don't work in labour-intensive or dirty work, you guys) are letting them grow long and only cut them to look even.

It's actually pretty interesting how these things develop. Well, and then of course there's you and Nora, hitting Concord up in fitted clothes- a simple, but nice-looking suit that gives yourself a certain level of presence and a dark evening dress that emphasizes her pregnancy rather than hide it, respectively, meandering through the streets with the smiling pre-war vampire hooked into your side.

"Admit it, you're enjoying making them look," your lover slash wife teases, a finger coming up to tap your cheek.

"I have the most beautiful woman in the city in my arm, is it really my fault when your very existence is me showing off?" Not that you roll over quietly without returning fire.

"Oh, you only dare to say that because I'm your only girl in town right now."

"Having more gems on my crown just makes all of them look better," you declare haughtily. "Oh, want to try eating over there?"

Both of you take a quick breath to analyze the scents wafting from the 'restaurant' you pointed out. Concord's public market is a lot more meandering than the central circle of stalls and shops in Diamond City, stretching through a few streets and one plaza thanks to the ample space everyone can access relatively easily, with repurposed standard houses serving the job- you've seen at least one clothing store that you're pretty sure is being supplied by the Minutemen directly selling standardized clothes in various colors, though weapons, ammunition, wood carvings, food and more are offered all throughout the place.

The place you want to go to in particular sells primarily mirelurk meat, though they've apparently managed to source several ingredients to serve additional dishes. "Sure, let's see what they've come up with."

As it turns out, the menu is almost respectable. You and Nora have access to so many bottle caps you can afford to spend however many you want, so you sample everything that looks appealing just out of mildly morbid curiosity; the baked and steamed mirelurk claws stuffed with tatos are actually surprisingly decent, the meat's juices and the preparation making the crop actually edible and the razorgrain noodles work well in the mirelurk soup, not to mention someone actually managed to come up with a way to use mudfruit juice to make a decent drink out of to go with this stuff.

All in all, this is turning out to be a surprisingly nice date with Nora. "You know, I wouldn't have thought it, but this is really good. And I don't just mean the food," she says, holding up her glass.

You gently clink your own against hers. "Oh, the city as a whole?"

"And more. I wouldn't have believed it, but you've actually carved out just a bit of civilization starting from nothing. I know you said you'd do it, but I'm impressed you pulled it off."

"Oh, I'm far from done, but I'll take it," you smirk, leaning back in the carved wooden chair. The people of Concord are already learning that while standardized furniture is easy to get and use, having something someone proficient and skilled made by hand is actually a symbol of status- you don't just have the free stuff, you paid someone to make something that has character, that isn't the same as everything else, that kind of thing. "May we eat even more interesting things this world holds, right?"

Nora chuckles to herself. "Right. Speaking of, though… I'm getting hungry for another kind of treat."

Somehow, the hand resting on her belly in a gesture of maternal concern doesn't look at all innocent to you.


Public displays of affection aren't necessarily uncommon in Concord- you've seen more than a few kisses, gropes and clear outlines of engorged nipples and penises on your way around this place- but still, you eventually decide against just walking into an alleyway together with Nora.

While doing the dirty on the fly like that has its own charms, you like to think you do something special for date nights like this… Well, for Nora, at least. You know Kate would have great fun 'marking' an alley in excess.

So instead the two of you sneak into an alley and jump up onto the nearest roof. Flat surfaces are what your robots went for at your instructions, so you have a more-or-less clear field of roofs before you, some buildings coming with additional floors and corresponding height than others.

The two of you share a mirthful look as you proceed to jump along, aiming for a particular rooftop conveniently located to grant a view of the moon now that it has risen and most people below you are going home for the night. People stay up for longer in Concord, not having to rise with the sun anymore and some finding it more convenient this way, but the night still does see a lull in activity overall.

Meaning it's more or less all yours.

"This takes me back," Nora says, holding your hand as both of you look up at the half moon visible hanging in the sky. "Here I am, pregnant and happy about it. Almost like the first family I tried to start."

"Still bitter about it?" You ask, not a shred of judgement or really anything at all in your voice.

"… A little. Less than I would have thought, even." Your lover sighs softly. "My ex-husband is dead, but at least Shaun could make a life for himself. Growing up without me and alone in this hostile world, but at least he's alive. And in the meantime… My new husband will make sure nothing of the sort can ever happen again, won't he?"

She lays her head against the crook of your neck, the two of you gazing at the moon together. You don't often think about it, but you like to consider it the sun of vampires; its light is a silvery reflection of the sun, of what life used to be like, the same but filtered through different and nigh unrecognizable means, not giving life nor needing to in the realm of the undead.

Its shine feels pleasant against your skin, too. "He will," you promise solemnly, wrapping one arm around Nora's side to gently feel her swollen belly, silently noting the size of her breasts that seem to be just a smidgen bigger than they used to be. "Nothing will ever dare to touch our family or else I'll tear entire planets apart for daring to."

"See, this is why so many women love you," Nora says. "You're the best catch a girl could ask for."

You share a deep kiss under the light of the moon. Soon its luster can hit even more of both of your skin, clothes discarded as you make passionate love.

This is why dates are a thing.


You're tempted to spend the rest of your night just being with Nora, or perhaps fiddle with things around Sanctuary a little more, in particular modifying the nursery a little more to add some additional child safety features such as padded walls, floors and ceilings, but after Kate pointed out that would make it kind of like a nineties' mental hospital cell, you relented.

Hesitantly, but you did. You totally could've made it look normal, but it's the principle that counts here.

Which brings you to what you decided to do instead. That is, what Taylor decided. She asked whether you had a minute and if you could help her test out some part of her powers that she only recently managed to muster in full.

You agreed of course, you know someone wanting to boast when you see them… assuming Taylor isn't suppressing her body language. It is through this series of events that you found yourself sitting on top of the rugged shell of a full-grown mirelurk queen, the creature the size of a house speeding through the wasteland surprisingly quickly and smoothly on its many legs.

Taylor is sitting right next to you of course, having assembled this thing out of a metric fuckton of smaller bugs, both mutated giant ones and otherwise. It was pretty visually impressive to look at, too, just this big squirming mass of insects crawling and climbing over each other, growing in size as more and more of them gathered from all around you until they kind of merged into each other, chitinous carapaces fitting together and becoming one congruent surface in the form of a dark green mirelurk queen.

Turns out your favorite literally biblical plague can't just split herself up into a bunch of bugs, she can also merge bugs outside of herself as if they were a part of her and use this to have them turn into other bugs she's controlled before. She's really proud of it, too, silently glancing at you intermittently to gauge your reaction.

"This is pretty neat," you finally say as you clear the unofficial borders of your direct area of control off towards the east, smiling at her. "Guess it'll come in handy going forward."

"I can also stretch my aura through my bugs." Well now that is the most interesting news you've heard in the past two minutes. "It scales with their size and numbers, so when I use my semblance, a single fly can only do a little, but with enough bugs and aura I can push it just as much as I could in person."

"And your bugs are a little stronger individually through it, I'm guessing," you conclude, one hand stretching to stroke Taylor's hair. She leans into your touch without a second thought. "You're incredibly dangerous to anyone that can't just shrug off aura-enhanced bugs, aren't you?"

"I am," the usually withdrawn and shy girl purrs. "Do you like it?"

"I love it," you shrug airily, turning towards Taylor fully- your seating might as well be solid stone for all you care thanks to your powers. "Almost as much as I love you."

The girl stiffens, even the mirelurk queen you're riding on stopping in its tracks. All around you, the ambient sound of insects skittering through the dry, radiation-blighted wasteland stills.

Cute.

Taylor isn't really reacting in any meaningful way beyond staring at you, so you cup her cheek as you nudge closer towards her. This seems to knock her out of her self-imposed stasis, eyes grown wide as she looks away. "Do you… mean that?"

Your response is to connect to her telepathically, not to communicate concrete words or concepts, but simply to shove your emotions right at her. Where your love to others is and feels different- deep and maniacally abiding for Sarah, respectful and casual for Kate, protective and supportive for Nora and so on- what you feel for Taylor is careful, hopeful and teasing, your enjoyment of the girl's subdued nature only spurned on whenever she tries to hide it.

She's like your cute pet crossed with an equal crossed with a trusted weapon, all wrapped up in someone that's adorably and delightfully fun to flirt with. You do love her, just like you've loved every woman you've turned into a vampire, and the fact you can and will live eternally just means you have that much more time to shower them all in your unconditional love.

"Does that answer your question?" You ask with a smile in your voice, noting the light blush on Taylor's cheeks. If she couldn't control its extent, you'd be willing to bet she'd be glowing red all the way to her ears.

"Don't you already know?" She asks, glancing towards you and back again, both hands rising from her lap in uncertainty.

"How would I? I can't read your mind unless you let me, remember?" You take both of her hands into yours.

"… I thought you would have a way to peek," she states testily. Oh, now she's just playing hard to please!

"And why would I? I do trust you, you know." You look up at the moon, the nightly celestial body slowly disappearing off in the horizon, already so faint a human wouldn't be able t see it. "And I will keep trusting you whether you like it or not. That's what this whole relationship comes down to."

"… Mhm." Slowly, the mirelurk queen gets moving again and you can hear screams and roars off in the distance. "I guess it does."

You keep the silence for a few moments, just enjoying your time holding Taylor's hands before you speak up. "Want to cuddle?"

"A little."

Long story short, Taylor ends up sitting in your lap, both of you delighting in the direct contact with each other. It's a pleasant nighttime voyage shared just between you, her and literal billions of bugs swarming out in all directions.

And they say you can't be romantic.


One point of interest now that you are looking to really advance your growing little empire on Earth fallout is the act of farming. You have human workers on the Thicket Ranch because mirelurks are too tricky for you to easily trust robots to take care of them- it's like keeping prisoners, just with more regular culling and needing to watch out for new plots they're hatching- but the farms?

Plants are generally much less difficult to tame than the insane mutated fauna around this place. Or at least the ones you're aware of, it could easily be that this dimension harbor some kid of man-eating murder flowers.

If so, they'd probably be in Florida. Just like all other bad things on the continent of North America.

Anyway, your farms. Well, technically, it's the Abernathy Farm, now with robots and a couple farmhands that have joined the family that owns the place (note to self, take some idle time to figure out how property and land ownership are going to work out under your rule in the long term) and Tenpines Bluff, the only two places with real farm land around Concord and Sanctuary. Most of the work on these is done with robots and some pumps to keep the fields irrigated, the primary crop being grown consisting of tatos, tatos and some more tatos.

Now the things is… Your robots for this purpose have been the standard Mister Handy model you adjusted way back when you really got into using the robot workbench (as separate from your manufactories in those early days of the GabeTech Empire). They've been doing well enough so far, especially with you mass-producing them as an afterthought to your actual robot army with some of the material you could throw around, but perhaps it would be just that much more efficient to utilize fewer, more specialized robots better equipped to handle these plants.

And perhaps other crops too, in the future. Tatos work well enough as basic foodstuff to be handed out by the surprisingly socialistic society you're building, now that you're thinking about it, but that shouldn't stop you from being able to reliably provide more varied kinds of food. As it is right now, you're selling some mirelurk meat thanks to those reproducing pretty quickly even without a queen shitting eggs all over the place, but anything else your people have to buy from traders that import it from outside of Concord.

Long story short, may as well improve these. It does help that you don't want to keep the eyesore of the native models of robots around more than necessary- not to sound like a snob, but your aesthetic standards conflict with what RobCo thought they were doing rather starkly.


The main body should be a little more squat, with several legs to distribute the weight properly without sinking even into soft ground. Fusion cores will, of course, provide the energy necessary to drive this thing while that genetic research camera you found in Rapture all the way back when you were making your way through the ruined underwater city will provide some additional kick- analyzing the genetic makeup of plants and identifying advantageous attributes to be encouraged through replanting of specific strains is the obvious use here.

Then there's marking down unwanted mutations, early warning of and countermeasures to potential crop failures based on generational changes… There's reasons enough for you to take a look at how that camera worked and find a way to minimize the amount of ADAM used to construct the relevant parts.

Active, non-ameliorated Adam would be a nightmare out in the wasteland, especially if it somehow mixes with FEV. It's less dangerous once it's been grown into something and just fulfills its functions, but even so, best to minimize risks and all that.

Now then… Add some 'feelers' with the sensors required to 'feel' for how the soil is doing as they walk along, a couple short robotic arms to do the actual gardening and farming equipment work that can be extended as necessary… Oh, and some vapor dispensers to let them regulate the fields' humidity to the optimal level, of course.

Those would of course work better in closed rooms, but on hotter days having something like that to keep the temperature down and some water in the air would be a godsend, you assume.

Top it all off by tying the programming into the larger network your machines just kind of build up to to have them coordinate and build up a library of sorts of good strains of whatever crops they're working on, comparing strategies and tendencies over longer periods of time and voila, one gardening robot design is ready. Just took, uh, a couple hours of concentrated work.

… Maybe you shall call them Sicklers. Or Sickle Two? You kind of want to stay with the USSR joke, but maybe you're stretching it for no reason at this point…


"The sun… It burns…" Funnily enough, extended periods of time without sunlight can still have thralls pale slightly, it just takes quite a long time, especially assuming the thrall in question is actively considering their current skin tone to be preferable to the alternative and the reverse happens much faster and easier, with the usual individual differences shifting the scales to a good extent.

Thralling just kind of builds up on whatever it starts with, after all. Nothing more and nothing less.

What you're getting at here is that although Isabel has been holing up underground for quite a while, never once leaving the factory that used to be her lair when she played at being the Mechanist, and yet she still looks the same as ever, her browned skin standing out in the morning sun under her almost conspicuously clean clothes.

Goes to show how used you are to the normal unwashed masses on Earth Fallout. "It isn't that bad. Now if you were a vampire…"

"It's bad enough for me," she grumbles, sticking to your arm. "And I'm not used to so many people at once."

Concord, the shining new center of civilization, even if its population is at most barely on the same level as Diamond City. It is early in the morning now, but a lot of the people that were drawn to the city are already active, having risen with the sun to get ready for a day's work, however that looks like for them.

You already have a couple of mirelurk skewers on hand, the overgrown crabs' meat being sold in chunks pierced by some stable wood and steamed evenly over a long period of time. Oil is a precious resource in the wasteland and hard to come by at the moment, which is why grilling them isn't the obviously better solution for anyone running a streetside cart, but even so, the meat is tasty enough and has retained almost all of its juice, which is the main selling point here.

You really need to get back to Nolac later, having actual olive oil and some condiments and stuff would be great. Spice is the sign of a prospering civilization, as you'd like to think, or at least the local food would be much tastier to sample.

"You really need to get out of that factory more often, just so you don't go crazy down there. Here, eat up!" Holding one of these skewers out, you smile at Isabel until she opens her mouth, taking a bite as you stick it in and pull it away again for her to chew on the meat. "Is it good?"

"Mgugugu," Isabel chews, swallowing and giving you a nod. "They're tasty, I guess…?"

"Good," you answer, taking a bite off of the skewer that was just between her lips, making a shows of licking along it to the sight of her blushing adorably like the shy wallflower she is. "Another bite?"

Not meeting your eyes, she nods again, leaning forward on the tips of her toes and closing her eyes to receive her indirect kiss.

You have a bunch of these skewers left. More than enough to make a whole breakfast out of this little exercise.


You've already been to Concord's market 'district' yesterday, but at the time you weren't really interested in browsing the wares available so much as you were just following your nose to the nearest eatery that had some nice scents surrounding it.

Now, though, you've decided to take your time. What kinds of stuff are people around Concord buying and selling out in the open? Not to mention you may as well make a shopping date out of this with Isabel, whether she wants to or not. Speaking of…

"Ugh, it's really way too hot up here." Peeling out of her top, basically a protective suit designed to keep flying sparks off her skin, your companion ties it up around her waist to cool down a little. Not satisfied with that, she then also ties her white shirt up in a knot before she continues eating from her third skewer, this one made of one continuous piece of meat as opposed to several chunks.

"You really aren't blessed with any amount of self-awareness, are you?" You ask, amused at her state of undress in a relatively public area. Then again, some of the people around here don't wear much more than this, either.

"What do you mean?" Isabel asks.

"Don't worry about it," you wave her off. "Let's go see what's for sale around here together."

"Oh, uh, sure. Just let me finish up here real fast."

Good to know impulse food buying is a universal factor, you suppose.

The crowd is still fairly sparse, but slowly growing in density. It shouldn't be surprising that anyone that actually has the bottle caps to buy stuff is coming to the market, but right now you can easily navigate around without needing to push people around, which is pleasant, if anything.

Now then… There's a few larger shops set up as it is right now, selling surplus clothes, as you noticed last time, weapons and ammunition- the average wastelander still does need to defend themselves, even if the city is a pretty safe area in general. There's also several food stores and vendors, including one dedicated noodle shop that you see; the prices are a bit high, but that's just what happens when most ingredients have to be imported externally in comparison to the free tatos everyone gets.

You aren't too worried. Nobody has to suffer too much hunger and that's already an enormous step up from the status quo.

That said, there's also a couple of stores with a little more… character, of their own. You see one place selling what you recognize as the work of the same person that carved a few of the wooden little toys Nora has added to the nursery, various kinds of toys and minor tools made of wood, and there's one store that actually sells furniture, simple and straightforward as it is.

Looks like your plan to just supply boring standard housing is coming up as a success. Everyone has a roof over their head and if they want to bring their own brand of personality into their homes, they can just decorate themselves.

That said, it has to be said that societal expectations really, really don't match up what you would consider the modern day, not that you mind terribly. Aside from a walk-in clinic run by a couple of doctors to treat any problems someone might bring to them and several drug kiosks that sell any kind of drug to anyone that so much as asks, there's a lot of indeed very much scantily clad men and women openly offering certain 'physical services' around, though you suspect more will be present later in the day when clients grow more plentiful.

Isabel blushes (adorably, as always) every time you walk past an alley containing someone having sex, but she doesn't say anything. Most people seem to be rather more casual about sexuality like this on Earth Fallout.

The post-apocalypse will do that, you suppose.

Which is also why you can't help but chuckle in amusement when you find the vendor selling sex toys, primarily a bunch of carefully carved dildos lined up along her counter.

People will do as people will do.

Of course you could have your manufactories do pretty much everything people are doing here, everything except actual salesmanship anyway. That said, if it lets you ensure a bunch of people are actually employed and productive, you don't think it's a bad idea to have them do artisan work like this; manpower grows a lot less important once large-scale automation lets you do the work of a hundred people in two minutes without wages.

Hurray for advanced, post-industrialized science, everyone.

"O-oh yeah, I just remembered something." Isabel, carefully not looking at the sex toy shop, nudges her body against yours. "Could we, maybe, make a few things and have people sell them here?"

"Hmm, what kinds of things?" Let's hear her out first of all.

"So, uh, I know there are showers in every house now, but there's these massage shower heads that make the water come out in patterns. I don't think anyone here could fabricate them, so maybe…"

"And here I thought it would be something difficult," you smirk as you wrap an arm around her waist, making her 'eep' and blush again. "Any other ideas for domestic products to be dispersed?"

"A-ah, a few?"

If you're going to be essentially keeping a stranglehold on a majority of markets, economically speaking, you may as well do it right."


Medford as a sector inside the map system you are using to roughly establish where what is has been the target of your cleanup efforts lately, the region directly east from Sanctuary and as such just very convenient for whenever you decide to expand in earnest.

That's more of a 'once you're done kicking the Brotherhood's face in' kind of thing, of course, but you may as well prepare; no offense except all the offense, but let's be honest here, nobody that relies on widespread power armor is a credible threat to you to begin with.

Like, yes, it's only natural to do so when you have a bunch of squishy humans that have received some training, but that's just it- when all they have is squishy humans, you kind of win by default. Not to even mention your literal complete immunity against the vast majority of their weapons and your ability to cast a single spell to blow up or disable most advanced devices and machinery, if they can't survive a spontaneous tripling of the force of gravity on their bodies, that's just kind of an instant loss right there.

And you can apply your esper power over very, very wide areas.

Then there's your hemokinesis, your physical capabilities, the wide range of powers you have access to in general and through the powered souls you captured… Really, there's little to no need to even consider using your larger, more monstrous forms.

Mostly just if you decide to style on these chumps, which to be fair is entirely possible if you don't just use a soul to instantly take over the airship you know them to be using as a mobile base.

Long story short, you're really just exploring the north-western quadrant of the Medford region to while away some time in a productive manner once you have Isabel off to fiddle with a few generic blueprints both to make use of the modified household appliances by selling them in Concord and for fun.

What you didn't necessarily expect was to find an old bunker sitting out in the wasteland, the blood signature of a single human inside it. Male, going by its outline, the steadily pumping red traversing broader shoulders and slimmer hips than if it were a woman's.

The door is locked with this magnetic mechanism you've noticed some locks in this dimension to consist of, the whole design not exactly uncommon. That said, few barriers are able to keep you out these days, so all it takes is some determined wiggling until you find an opening where the elements, rust and sheer time have worn down the metal of the door enough for you to push through.

Once inside, you find the place to be consisting of a single, messy room, the man you went to look for not far from a couple of guns he is taking apart and maintaining with the ease of long practice, a panicked look thrown towards the entrance every now and then only to calm down as if he was ascertaining it was still closed.

He is also wearing the combat fatigues of a member of the Brotherhood of Steel. Which, uh, is a little weird; there shouldn't be any of them outside of Danse's little group and especially not this far up north. Heck, if he managed to dig a tunnel unnoticed, he could have even come all the way to Sanctuary without your knowledge!

Where your wives live. And where some of your kids may at some point be.

Which is… suboptimal.


It is, as ever, laughably easy to ambush a human, simply appearing out of the ground behind him too quickly for the man to react and hooking razor sharp claws into his spine to immobilize him, followed by a quick bite as the guy's desperate attempts at screaming and grunting and pointing a weapon behind himself all fail.

You chew through the leathery collar of his uniform just as easily as you do through skin and flesh, quickly earning your reward in the form of a steady stream of blood being drained like through a pump. It takes mere moments, as usual, and the member of the Brotherhood you found, a Paladin Brandis as you quickly grow aware, falls to the floor, dead and his soul joining the small legion of 'em inside your stomach.

He was actually a survivor of an earlier scouting expedition. Huh. Figure that, you suppose. Not that it matters much now, of course, but he ran like hell when his group was overwhelmed by feral ghouls inside a place quite a bit to the south-east from this bunker, the National Training Yard, but was the only one to ever make it back to this rendevouz point.

Where he then promptly proceeded to develop a healthy sense of paranoia and PTSD, in your own expert opinion. Apparently, the entire stretch of land around where Boston used to be was just too scary and unpredictable for him to ever dare to set foot outside of his hidey-hole again.

That was around three years ago and he would've eventually run out of food, you're pretty sure, but hey, now he's got a new, even more secure bunker. Unless you decide to get rid of him, but that's relatively unlikely. Either way, that's that taken care of, now it's time for you to disable this bunker entirely.

Which you do by concentrating for a moment and redirecting gravity, increasing its pressure all the while. The concrete is set in deep, anchored against solid stone, but you're subjecting it to enough force that…

Ah, there it is. Slowly, but surely, the foundations rumble and crumble, the roof cracking and falling apart under the weight it suddenly has to bear, the entire construction's amplified weight pressing against it, and just like that you have torn the small bunker out of the ground.

A quick jump later to get right out, you dash it against the roadside, the precipitous, bare rock around you the only witness to your feat of supernatural power.

Well, that and the handful of birds circling above, Whether they're real or controlled by the Institute you can't say and neither do you really care all that much.


With nothing more to be done, you pick a random direction (well, not towards the north, there's just mountains and nothing of note in that direction for miles) and get going, bounding over the ground and the trees you return to after a short while, gravity not so much not holding you as you point it at where you want to go, making this mode of travel a mix between leaping and a free fall whenever you decide not to touch the ground.

And hey, falling horizontally is weird, but you can get used to it. It's like the whole world is tilted around you and you have to reorient yourself, but hey, you've had much, much weirder. The real question is how you should fall; with your feet first, or your head? Or any of your sides? Should you face the ground, the sky, the direction you're falling toward or away from it?

These are some hard decisions. They deserve their own time to think through each of them properly and in sequence. Honestly, let whatever it be said about the Gravity Well plasmid and its alternate mode of travel you've figured out recently be, but it is much simpler and more direct in this regard.

It's also more stylish, you'd say, even if it leaves some pretty obvious traces considering the polyps produced during its use tend to do their thing and tear up anything nearby.

Well, going a bit further up, you soon come upon a somewhat odd sight in this area; a more or less intact building, a warehouse specifically, standing in the middle of nowhere with a few rusty cars parked in front of it.

Well, you can sense a few presences in there, the uneven circulation of blood you become acutely aware of as you draw closer matching that of ghouls from your observations so far. It's good enough for you to go see what's up.

Finding the door once you land, you close your eyes, concentrating on the weird humming you can hear, or at least that's how you're interpreting it. Of course, as you aren't bothering to be quiet, a radroach, fat and literally glowing green from under its carapace, but a quick kick has you punting it against the nearest wall without issue.

Well, one issue, you got moist bug chunk all over your shoe, but hey, you don't really mind. When all it takes to clean yourself is a quick jump into your shadow state and back, you just lose most inhibitions about letting fluids cover yourself.

Even if they're kind of disgusting.

The ghouls you don't take long to attract don't fare any better, either, but you hardly pay them any attention, instead far more focused on what else you find inside the warehouse.

That is, barrels of something you can't help but describe as the biggest pile of radioactive waste you have seen in one place yet. The place is filled with them, overflowing as though it comes with a direct connection to a dozen facilities mass-producing it.

Somewhere inside you, you can feel Yoshi scream and rage that this is why he hates fusion cores. The philistine.

At the very least, you're pretty sure you know what you've been hearing- or maybe rather just feeling in your ears? The ability to sense vastly elevated levels of background radiation is nice, at least, even if you can completely ignore this kind of radiation without issue.


Well, masterful techniques for just putting radioactive waste out of sight and mind you have found in this place aside, you'd best just… leave this as is for now. Sure, you can feel a weird heat when you have a hand closer to those barrels telling you a human's skin would be peeling from doing so or something, but as it is, your aura is keeping you perfectly safe and you have no particular desire to mess with this building's contents, so you just shadow straight out of there.

Far out of there. And you make sure to mark your map with plenty of warnings once you have Nolac use the teleporters to get yourself back to Sanctuary, the homing beacon of your phone still serving to let you locate yourself with ease within the reaches of your signal's spread.

Which in turn brings you to what you're doing next, making the genderfluid mad doctor crossed with a deranged artist come with you to explain, in depth, how well a certain set of experiments has gone. But first…

"This is tortuuure… I've been doing nothing but mixing powder for days…"

Cupcake's punishment needs some seeing to.

"You don't need to sleep that often and you get to take regular breaks, I don't see what your issue is here," you proclaim as you roll up your sleeves to join her in the alchemy workshop. You will need as much rust pulver as you can get soon enough, the stuff can be packed into bags and fired off thanks to a few modifications you made to the artillery pieces you adapted and put onto robot legs.

"I wanna laze around and eat sweets!" Cupcake whines, throwing her head left and right in and raising her arms protest. "I wanna live the high life againnn!"

"You'll get to do that in a couple days at most, I'm not gonna punish you forever. So long as you promise not to take apart your minder again," you say, patting the floating robot with the many, many tentacle-like arms on the main body. "Speaking of, did you apologize already?"

"I did, but he won't take me on rides anymore," she pouts. Good. That means the changes to the programming you sneaked in are working as intended. You aren't a complete expert on the software part of this stuff, your preferred method of doing things is to just set up a self-improving algorithm and let it go from there, so it's always good to confirm.

"Well maybe he'll forgive you when he decides you've made up for mutilating him," you conclude, already considering when you'll sneak in a reversal of your temporary behaviour block. "Now let's get right back to work, shall we?"

Nearby, hanging around the entrance to the workshop, Nolac snorts, casually shifting from one gender and appearance to the next. "Dunno why y'all think Yoshi's funny when this is right there."

"I didn't call you here to watch us work, how's the whole Crop Adaptation Program been going? I want some varied plant growth around here at some point."

The CAP truly is some peak naming sense on your part, you'll readily admit.

"Yeah, so, about that, boss…" Oh dear, that doesn't sound good.


As you work along with a grudging Cupcake (Cuppycake, as you call her for fun this time), you have Nolac walk you through the test results available so far. Well, it's less the results of actual tests and more just the simulations they've run the seeds you brought with you through to see what happens under what circumstances, but really, same difference in the end.

What it comes down to is that you don't need to waste a bunch of test subjects on the way. Say what you will about your go-to soul for medical matters, but the powers that come with the rest of the package do come in handy.

And yes, by that you mean their combined personalities. They're assholes, there, you said it.

Anyway, testing. Nolac's first large-scale assignment during this visit to Earth Fallout, aside from assisting Taylor with her whole thing, was to try and adapt the seeds of several useful plants to be able to grow in the shitshow that is the climate surrounding you and your operations through whatever means of genetic alteration are necessary.

Both ADAM and FEV are kind of miracle workers but even so, they need to be applied very, very carefully.

Which brings you to what Nolac has been able to achieve so far. It's less than you'd like, but more than you would've hoped for, accounting for your careful balance of optimism and pessimism.

Most of the seeds you brought… didn't pan out, really, but the ones that did did so with some good results. Tomatoes have managed to mutate into a larger variant the size of human heads and while their taste has suffered a little, they're still tastier than the standard tato, though they require quite a lot of water. Potatoes invariably seem to die out after at most a generations, however, so the standard tato will likely remain the primary source of food for your livestock for the time being.

That said, olives have managed to persevere, which means that finally, widely available oil meant for consumption shall be viable! Sure, they take a long time to grow and may have a tendency to grow into murderous vines, but that's a small sacrifice for making them actually grow and be harvestable.

And while most plants may have trouble growing properly, sugar beets and pepper also seem to be available. You'll manage to wrangle these unwashed peasants into proper people yet!

Incidentally, poppy also managed to thrive in the trial simulations, as did weed. The latter is a bit… problematic, insofar as it mutates horribly seemingly and random, but hey, it's something.

Overall, only a small subset of the plants you wanted to grow in surface conditions can do so, but the ones that seem to be able to consist of a few of the more important ones for your culinary plans. Actually, all you'd need now is a reliable source of salt and you could go places, really.

Oh, and you did continue to make a bunch of rust pulver, too. Multitasking is a bit easier thanks to your enhancements, after all.


Jezebel's cyborg body is proving to perform at the expected level. Honestly, if it wasn't an industry the cattle can staff itself, making a bunch of copies with cookie cutter fake personalities to serve in a brothel would be an interesting exercise.


Last minute preparations are, as always as far as you're concerned, the penultimate opportunity to ready everything you need. There's just something about an approaching deadline, or as it is an approaching army, that motivates you to actually give it your all instead of just casually improvising a few strategies and countermeasures and leaving it at that.

So instead you now improvise wholeheartedly. Because let's face it, you always improvise. Pretending anything else would be doing a disservice to your ability to do so while looking like you were planning everything out all along.

Your night, once you are done doing your obligatory quick training montage, is spent organizing defense plans. Your strategy of sending single BATS out of the Commonwealth to scout out its surroundings has born fruit in that you know the Brotherhood is coming atop their ship, the Prydwen as you know and can confirm from Brandis' testimony, having looked over his memories as added to your inner world's repositories, from the south, taking a course avoiding the worst of the constant radiation storms of the Glowing Sea and straight out over the Commonwealth as a whole.

Naturally they won't make it far, but you heavily assume they'll be shitting out vertibirds filled with power armored goons all over the place as soon as they arrive to establish a ground presence while their flying fortress gets into position. And while you could bar their entry into what you seek to claim as your land entirely, doing so would not be without its own logistical difficulties, even with widespread teleportation in the game.

So you need to draw them in and crush them. Cupcake has been working hard, for all her complaining, and you have ample amounts of rust pulver on hand, so you go ahead and carefully fill it into cloth bags you then load into projectiles that are essentially structurally unsound cannon balls, designed to survive being shot out but not impact.

End result, a big load of powder being splattered all over the place. A bunch of it will hit the ground as spillover, but that just means you need to avoid firing at targets over allied locations and personnel.

Then, of course, there's… Hack. Hack who has a bunch of bodies. And you make a bunch more, bidding them to rest before tomorrow morning. Even if they pop after doing just a single thing, a couple dozen single-use 'fuck you's are better than none.

"This is gonna be awesome and oh can we jump rope with their spines? Can we? Can we? Pleeeaaase?"

"You be glad I'm letting you out to play at all. And remember, I want all of your bodies to be gone a day after the fight, got it?" It is a compromise. Hack does her thing, you will let her play around for up to one day as long as she doesn't mess with your interests.

It's all a matter of wrangling aspects of your own psyche into playing along. You're just doing so a lot more literally than most.


Funnily enough, too, you have recently finally managed to acquire a certain ability through intense study and comparing your ability to hop between dimensions like a stone skipping on water; no longer shall being in an entirely different dimension stop you from accessing a somewhat powerful part of your repertoire as far as minions are concerned.

Sure, it takes a lot of additional time before you can slip another act like this past reality, but calling in some of your creation is totally worth it. "That which I have brought to unlife, heed my call, feel your chains, and come to your master, for a task awaits!"

A loud, mechanical screech, metal rubbing against metal with a tearing note to it. The reanimated body of the Songbird, wrapped and filled up with its armor, appears as though from nowhere, diving from the sky to flap its wings as it lands amidst Sanctuary.

It is easily as tall as most of the buildings you went ahead and had built, but it doesn't stand around for long; crouching down, the broken glass of the lenses of its eyes come to eye level with you.

"Yaaay! Best body has arrived! The Murder Pigeon will come to destroy all that exists and-"

"Can it Hack, you aren't inside of the thing yet. Also, just make sure you don't whiff it and break it, it's a unique."

You would hate to lose it. You've always been kind of a sucker for souvenirs like this, even if you had to leave all your little odds and ends behind after your death. Well, it wasn't really that large of a collection and now you can gather some new stuff instead that's just way more interesting.

Just look at Last Embrace, made by your own hands with techniques and knowledge swiped from another dimension and later remade with materials from another one yet. Yes, including the demonic essence.

Meanwhile, a quick look confirms that the weather is looking good. Nearly clear skies, just a few clouds making their way along them, with some wind kicking up in a south-western direction to keep the worst of the radiation from the bomb that blew up Boston away from the Commonwealth.

One of the advantages of being you, the weather is always around what you want it to be when you get into it.

It's gonna be a blast, you can feel it already.