You've been kind of curious about it for a while now. What is Nuka Cola, exactly? Is it just a local variant of Coca Cola with different marketing? Is it some other stuff that's just kinda reminiscent of it?
Turns out, yes, it's almost exactly like the original Coca Cola. "That's a bit much cocaine they put into it."
"Oui, oui. 'ow irresponsible of them." See, even Curie agrees with you. "Someone could 'ave refined the fluid and gone on to sell it! 'ow 'orrible."
"Exactly," you say. Hey, anything Curie says with her accent is right far as you're concerned… Unless you actually have an opinion on the matter yourself. "Ah well, let's just go ahead and note this down. Then we can-"
You're cut off by Preston bugging you over telepathy. Dammit, what is it now?
According to the reports Preston can get you, you seem to have a problem, after all. There's a massive wave of vegetation growing all over the borders to the Glowing Sea, the area surrounding the impact site of the biggest nuke that went down near Boston and completely atomized most of the city back when things really started going down, and unfortunately for yourself, it doesn't seem like the 'normal' rejuvenation you've kind of triggered closer towards the north.
For one, the radiation is still going in that area, as strong as ever. You also didn't really direct much water towards the south, so any developments in this direction shouldn't be connected to your activities so far. Instead, it seems almost like a… reaction, for lack of a better word, to you looking at the rad storms and saying 'no thanks, also fuck you'.
Hence you, naturally, instruct the undead you created and sent off to the Glowing Sea to fight stuff and ensure no great deathclaw incursions or anything happen- you know a lot of wacky shit can happen in this dimension, the massive murder machines deciding to grow intelligent and organize somehow doesn't seem so out of left field these days- to go and take a look. In the first place, you didn't notice so far because it seems none of that plant growth is going on in the areas they're moving through, but your coverage of the Glowing Sea in general is fairly minimal in general.
It can't really be helped. The radiation interferes with your radio signal sometimes and all your applicable tech is based on it, to some extent, so your BATs just keep their distance and patrol the surroundings where thing are a little less insane, pretty much. That said, it is a good thing the Minutemen are indeed hooked into your surveillance net and have people watch parts of the footage you get in shifts, else you wouldn't have even noticed for weeks.
Covering an area equivalent to a state is hard work, you know?
Anyway, looking through the eyes of your green servants, as you did make them out of supermutants, you see the completely barren plains that characterize the Glowing Sea, a couple of mountains popping up to divide it into sectors. Here and there, corroded metal and concrete poke up out of the ground, as not every trace of civilization was destroyed wholesale so much as ground down and, in many cases, buried.
There isn't much light, the constant cover of thick, dark and heavy clouds shutting the sun out entirely and the only living beings that can thrive in this environment are mutated animals constantly fighting for survival against one another- no plants, the most you can get are some mosses and fungi that grow inside the closed rooms of underground caves and surviving structures.
A heady haze hangs over everything, the constant radiation being absorbed by pretty much any material in the entire region. You may or may not need to completely cauterize these undead before you ever let them go anywhere else, lest they spread the issue around, too.
You were kind of hoping a few of them might start glowing or something at least, but nothing of the sort has happened to date. Sadly.
That's when your troop of jolly little cooperators sights the… issue, let's call it. Towards the edges of the Glowing Sea, where the radiation is still bad enough to kill a grown man in a minute or two, but doesn't literally boil the flesh off of any non-adapted creatures, you see…
Well, a sea of green. With a few spots of red and purple thrown in for good measure. Where once was nothing but a field of burnt-out tree stumps and ashen earth, a veritable jungle is now rising towards the sky, rich vegetation stretching as far as the eye can see.
You mentally instruct one of your undead to investigate one of those purple pods, having the other proceed onward to get yourself a closer look at the old-timey cars further back. This place really must have grown brutally fa-
One of the plant pods violently explodes, seed shrapnel covering the area and boring into your bulked-up Mr. X. This triggers a chain reaction where the others, too, begin to violently shake, betraying the enormous pressure their insides are apparently under.
Then a couple more hit and yeah, that one minion is dead meat. Splitting up the group, you observe with the others how the seeds, almost formed into flat, oval knives, germinate before the eyes of your undead, quickly growing and using their victim's flesh as nourishment somehow.
They don't grow into a full new plant within minutes or anything, but they do grow… fast. Very, very fast.
… Yeah, this is going to be kind of a problem until you solve it.
"Yoshi! Get me the best herbicide you can envision and then throw it away because Nolac is better with toxins anyway, we have a mutant forest to kill!"
Time to immediately take off any kiddy gloves you have lying around and throw them into the fire, it's time for some industrial levels of 'solution'.
Okay, it's a brand new day and you have a brand new list of priorities to work your way through. Well, at least you can delegate a lot of said work to the others, right?
Right. That's why Kate is taking Cait and that one rambo raider chick to have a talk with a couple settlers, as does Taylor- there's too many settlements you want to establish de facto control over and, all of a sudden, not enough time to deal with them all individually, so you simply have to give up on your little hobby of seeing to them all one by one.
Eh, it'll be fine. They'll join or they won't and you can simply send waves of robots to eradicate anything around them until they do, no skin off your back.
And yes, you're sending Isabel off to Lynn Woods while you're at it. There's supposed to be a medium-sized settlement there, so a few thousand combat-ready robots will hopefully represent enough power to make sure they take her seriously. And if not, well, you're sending Isabel there with an army of robots. She has all the hammers she could want at that point, regardless of whether she hammers the nails down or need to build a cabin from the ground up, to butcher the metaphor a little more thoroughly.
Cupcake also insisted she go with her. As Isabel's bodyguard. You just asked the only responsible one of the two to keep an eye on her for you.
You, meanwhile, are occupying yourself with the big problem you are faced by this time. Naturally, you are doing so by sending your undead scouting for a while longer, having discovered that there's some kind of static the jungle seems to be filled with that is interfering with your usual signal frequency. That means your robots can operate within, but they can't send information back and forth, which makes scouting a great deal harder on them in case they're destroyed before they can get back out and ensure a clean transmission again.
So there you are, setting up an improvised outpost outside of this flash jungle. The growth of the plants is slower, this far out, but still distinct and notable, taking more territory at a snail's pace across a couple hundred miles at once. Your BATs are scoping out the front now, as it were, while you and a few security Hammers are working on finding out a bit more about how these plats actually work.
Cue the frequently shifting overlay you have going on with Nolac and Yoshi, using a summoned research camera full of more ADAM than mechanical components and careful to only touch the plants with your claws. You always knew that damn camera would come in handy at some point.
So what's the first rule of evil radiation rain forests? That's right, they're irradiated. To literally nobody's surprise, the Geiger counter you brought with you for clarification purposes begins ticking out steadily more intensely the closer you get, going from 'could be background radiation, you know' to 'you probably shouldn't breathe here'. By the time you reach the tree line, the latter is very much the case and a few quick experiments prove that the deeper you go, the more irradiated everything becomes.
Most of the trees are just that, big, wooden trees, though they're actually surprisingly resilient to most forms of damage- you can saw through them, sure, but the wood is really fucking tough and not all that easily flammable, being very much alive and full of fluids.
One of those common misconceptions. Living wood actually takes some real effort to set on fire, which is why forest fires don't happen literally all the time unless the area is really dry so the wood isn't as wet inside.
Non-sequitur aside, you have a bit of a job to do here. Measuring out a bit of the forest (while staying to the other regions, of course), you quickly determine that the level of radiation present directly corresponds to the plant growth you're able to measure, making it fairly obvious that these things do, indeed, feed off of radiation to grow… somehow.
Deeper analysis will likely take some time. Nevertheless, those purple pods, while less abundant than deeper in where your undead are roaming, are still around out here; they seem to react to quick movement in the immediate area, acting as mines that trigger other nearby clustered ones and grow more of themselves out of their victims, essentially. Pretty nasty, and that's coming from a guy that once sewed a bunch of corpses together and filled the insides of their collective skin with a mix of petrol and flamer liquid.
Good news is, though, your herbicide seems to be effective. A brackish, blue liquid that just kills off any smaller plants it hits in sufficient amounts and even causes the bigger ones to wilt. It's, uh, it's pretty aggressive, but a month or two of rain should neutralize it, so it also should suit your purposes very well indeed.
That's not to say sending a few thousand robots equipped with flamethrowers in addition to herbicide sprinklers would be a bad idea, mind you, killing everything with fire is generally a good idea when dealing with these levels of biological contamination. Because surprise, surprise, you've filtered the air a little, too, and it turns out if you were a living person outside of a hazmat suit, you'd have died within minutes of breathing too closely to this place. Several distinct species of fungi seem to be emitting highly lethal spores that just cover the whole forest.
Granted, you are both immune to that shit and inside a hazmat suit to be sure about this stuff, but your immense competence and immunity against pretty much most things around aside, this is one lethal rainforest.
And none of the science you've done so far has brought you any closer to the real issue here, that is, how and why the fuck these mutant plants suddenly decided to grow all over your backyard.
Well, situations such as this call for one thing and one thing only. Taking out your modified smartphone, you give out a few orders to, well… All your robots.
All the ones that don't have anything else to do anyways, same difference. The only thing you care about here is that you have a couple tens of thousands of robots to spare.
Within minutes, your mighty army assembles, arraying itself all along the edge of this forest in orderly formation. A few quick changes thanks to your manufactories and the simple, but incredibly effective and easy to modify designs you use for everything later, your Hammers are wielding chainsaws in addition to their usual equipment and your Spiders… Can just mow everything in sight down manually, you suppose, screw 'em.
Their main purpose is, after all, to violently shoot and dig out any tree stumps and eradicate the more dangerous plants, should any of them prove to be so.
Your legions begin their advance with the crack of ionized matter being flung through the air, wasting little time in using their deadly weapons as the equivalent of very deadly construction tools. Row by row of Hammers advances, directing their brightly glowing ire at the vegetative (literally so) foes daring to show themselves before you.
Yes, yes, you're going nuts over a bunch of trees. Even if some of them are explosive, they probably don't really warrant this level of emotional investment from yourself. Ah well, can't all be winners and all that jazz.
At any rate, the surprise rain forest is made short work of. Tens of thousands of robots, as a number, is easy to just take for granted and think deeper about, but when you actually do, you quickly realize that hey, that… Is a lot of robots.
A lot lot. Enough to blot out the ground in their metal glory. There are so many of them, acting in perfect unison to boot, that the racket they make is loud enough to shake the earth under their feet (and assorted robot limbs), echoing for what has to be miles and making you damn glad you can selectively dampen the sensitivity of your senses because holy fuck, would you be in pain right now otherwise.
You contemplate teleporting yourself a beach chair and some mudfruit lemonade in for your amusement as you watch how progress is made and wait for the inevitable moment of a singular setback you immediately trounce as a minor speedbump to your way of raping this forest off the map, but ultimately decide against doing so; instead, you demonstratively crack your neck (which you can only do because you can control your bone placement to some extent) and looking at the jungle stretching before yourself sternly.
"Alright, let's see… Find me the source of the forest!" No result, likely too abstract. That's alright, you assumed as much. "Find me the origin of the forest! Find me the oldest plant of this forest!"
Now you're getting somewhere. More abstract targets tend to cause this spell to fail, but if you can plainly define things somehow, it tends to work easily. The trick is to keep things measurable- it's not like there's a stamp on a place that certifies it as the 'forest origin', but your magic is perfectly capable of finding out the relative ages of all the plants within and compare them against each other.
It's just how it works. Makes sense, yeah?
Anyway, while you don't exactly have a map, you can just triangulate the more or less exact location by teleporting yourself to another part of your robot army, then estimate the distances involved based off of the different directions your spell points out to you to determine the angles involved. Easy.
This gives you a pretty good idea of where to look for whatever started this mess you're cleaning up in the first place. But what-
"And The Great Atom Shall Rebirth The World Inside Himself!" You don't look. You don't look. You don't look and confirm the immediately and directly obvious. "The Metal Abominations Against His Name Shall be Cleansed With Glorious Division!"
Fuuuuuuuuuuuck. It's insane zealots praying to some obscure creature or concept that may or may not have some kind of plant technology to let their 'God' create their objects of worship for them, isn't it?
… This has to be karma of some kind. You're not sure how, but it's the only explanation for how this can even happen.
Ugh, screw it. Looking them over one last time, you come to a decision as to their fate, gesturing for the small group of three humanoid people that you suspect are at least technically kind of human.
You say that because you can see, roughly, that not all of their forms has retained normal blood circulation; if you were to guess, it looks a lot like they have some kind of parasitic plant symbiosis going on, judging by appearances.
Your telekinesis takes hold of of one of the suspected cultists easily enough, yoinking him off his feet and pulling him through the air regardless of his surprised cries and flailing limbs. The other two are simply affected by your gravity manipulation, falling into your approximate direction as well.
Once your primary victim is close enough, you snatch him out of the air, pulling one arm straight off in an explosion of blood and biting through the shoulder wholesale. He dies as they usually do, within moments, leaving you to concentrate on his compatriots.
One of whom just pulled out a small purple pod, somehow unexploded despite their usual functions. "We will be reborn in His Division!"
He jams the plant into his chest, making it vibrate like they always do before exploding. Then, proving these people have a way with plants, it doesn't just blow him up, instead rapidly growing gnarled roots into and through his upper body as it glows with unnatural light.
Then it explodes, with several times the usual force, causing you to raise an eyebrow as you're pelted with sharpened seeds and bone fragments. Your aura flares up to keep you from harm, of course, and you can stay in place despite the surprising strength of this explosive.
Plant suicide bombers. Lovely.
As for the last one, regarded by you expectantly while you use your hemokinesis to slurp up the guy that just pulled a pretty good impression of the average religious zealot and still get his soul into your collection, the literally wooden person points a…
A pistol of sorts, at you. The roots pointing from their body in all directions writhe as a damn seed gun opens fire on you, carelessly deflected by snips of your fingers as they land all around yourself instead of coming anywhere close to actually hitting you.
"You know, I'm pretty curious how this stuff even works," you politely inform the cultist of your thoughts. Your surroundings are already overgrown with shrubbery, thick bushes covered in thorny vines mildly impeding your legs as you crush them under your heels. "I'll be sure to find out in just a moment."
Then you rip the creature apart, already having identified the issue you would have if you didn't. The outer layers of their body have been replaced with the same tough wood that you've noted the local trees to possess, too thick of an armor for your teeth to get at the vulnerable flesh beneath.
The cultist grunt out in anguish, but with half their throat equally replaced by wood, they can't even scream properly. A quick bite into the now freed up inner workings of this half-tree-person later, you add yet another little informant to your total.
… And they apparently count as nonhuman enough they're put into yet another part of your menagerie, an endless sea of trees that spontaneously manifested within your soul's sub-space.
The taste of these guys' souls is… a little weird, you ponder to yourself as you let it play out on your tongue. Not quite the same as normal people's, a little different and with kind of less flavour…
You wonder if this might just be the taste of fake meat tofu. It would make sense, given these assholes' apparent gimmick. Speaking of, though their memories aren't quite clear to your sight, obscured by the haze of slow-onset insanity slash dementia and plenty of drugs and whatever else the parasitic plants seem to be producing for their hosts…
Because that's what they're about.
From what you can tell despite the mental alterations muddling things up a bit, these were indeed cultists, to little surprise. To be precise, they belong to a splinter group of the Children of Atom that hit upon a particular discovery one day, a tree in the middle of a forest that just grew out of the ground for no apparent reason.
The tree growing out of a guy named Harold.
Harold who, it seems, is continually begging for someone to kill him already, but these numbnuts misinterpreted that as a test of faith of some sort.
Yeah…
Anyway, there were other people there already, some of which died when the Children of Atom hit the place up in force after discovering that the plants growing out of the forest there could, in some rare cases, absorb radiation as nourishment and grow at vastly accelerated rates. They don't somehow metabolize it away, mind you; they just… store it, releasing it again as spores or pollen or just from their dead parts after they eventually die off.
There was a bit of a violent struggle for the interpretation of this discovery as the upper ranks of the Children fought about how to interpret it, but ultimately they did as they apparently always do, splitting into two and decrying each other as traitors.
That's all well and good, but it turns out the Children of Atom actually had a whole bag of tricks up their sleeves, including a few ways to not only survive through any given amount of radiation, but also a couple of ways they could influence the radiation plants, rapidly growing a whole slew of variants and basically playing biotinkers.
There's a reason you don't play biotinker unless you're ready for everyone else to open fire on you.
Ultimately, a large chunk of them eventually set out to 'spread the word' as is also a common happenstance with their cults, birthing the first real expedition of the Children of Harold. You have no idea what kind of person Harold is, but… he has your condolences over that, if nothing else.
They sneakily entered the Commonwealth (well, 'sneakily', they just didn't start randomly atomizing people until halfway through), then made their way towards the Glowing Sea, where they knew a lot of radiation was around, and pretty much murdered the Children of Atom that, obviously, had to live inside the crater the big nuke that created this whole mess in the first place left, and 'spread their seeds' to create this little forest area before you.
And yes, you chose your words deliberately. The Children of Atom had a lot of weird rituals and the Children of Harold aren't much different, except a lot more parasitic flesh-eating plants are involved now.
Seriously, they literally replace their bodies with plants that aggressively 'eat' their insides and replace them with themselves. It's actually really painful from what you can tell of your victims' memories, and more concerningly they've already started to do the same to various wasteland animals.
As in, the mutated ones. It's extremely risky for them, but apparently they've got a few deathclaws with vines growing out of their heads now, while the oldest and most 'advanced' among their own are already growing roots and more or less stuck in place as they become more and more plant-like in imitation of Harold.
The source of this forest and their apparent power over it? A sapling grown from that same guy. You aren't fully sure the memories you see are real, but it might be possible that several of these guys working together could actually directly manipulate the plants around them, force them to grow given things or just use them as essentially giant battering rams by explosively accelerating growth.
You look up. You tilt your head. A massive mass of wood is pushing out of the forest, mowing down a formation of robots some of which don't get back up, as not all of them are able to react in time. Instead the surrounding bots immediately switch targets, disintegrating the wood and cutting into it at speed even as the stuff just stubbornly grows back from however much radiation is being pumped into it elsewhere.
You take a look, but wherever the cultists are, they are too deep into the woods, too far for your blood senses to pick up on them.
Amidst the clanking grinding of metal on metal and splintering wood as your robot legions unleash their power, you sigh. This is going to be such a pain, isn't it?
Screw it, the situation is somewhat under control, your usual strategies of just recycling any destroyed robots to keep up your total combat strength working just fine as long as you don't take truly ruinous amounts of casualties and your robot factory can't keep up, in which case your teleporters will still secure the materials for new robots just as before. In the meantime…
You look up at the sky. Then you glance at the forest one last time before you will leave. Ah well, a little extra attention doesn't hurt, right?
You set the skies into motion, swirling, churning clouds following your commands as the wind picks up slowly. It'll take a bit longer, but you'll turn this whole place into a winter wonderland in short order. Try and adapt to this one, asshats!
… In case they actually do, you'll immediately make it rain something really hot and destructive as a counterpoint, of course. Your weather manipulation may be somewhat slow, especially if you have to forcefully fight through what you've done beforehand, but its extremely wide range is quite adequate to this situation, you'd say.
Your range is also going to come into handy here. Extremely conventient to just work away on the other side of the Commonwealth while simultaneously directly influencing the weather here.
Never start a land war against a sufficiently motivated vampire.
Working with Curie is, as always, a pleasure. Even if you do have to rush development a little on account of the urgent need for a dedicated facility for this instead of the simple set of labs you've been using so far.
Heh. Look at yourself, considering 'just a few labs' insufficient. Then again, perhaps you will finally get to live every little boy's dream and build a big arena where you can make your mutated science experiments fight for your amusement and to 'gather data', even if that is very much not how that actually works.
"Can we 'ave some more pipes here?" Curie asks as the two of you oversee the robot construction crew hard at work constructing your very own biolabs. "We may 'ave need of increase flow through these tanks."
"You're absolutely right. One moment." You just love the digital interface you made for designing basic stuff like this and having your robots immediately copy those plans over.
"Good work. And good work to you, too." Getting up on her toes, Curie pats a passing Bob on the main body, the floating metal abominations completely uncaring of her praise. "Such disciplined workers…"
You have no idea how much of this is her being serious and how much she's just playing around for the hell of it, but you're glad she's having fun either way.
Still things finish up soon enough after just half a day of intense work, transforming both the Wes-Tec facilities stretching deep underground and the former Vault 75 into massive laboratory spaces, connected to each other and rather quite retrofit.
You also did go ahead and capture a few supermutants to throw into your tanks. And not to worry- any given chamber can be voided by teleporting everything inside of it into space at any time, making working with FEV a lot safer for once.
"It looks absolutely fantastic. A very chic laboratory." Curie can't seem to get enough of looking in all directions, surveying this newly opened domain. "So much space, too! It has to be wasteful, no?"
"I added it for your sake," you confess what you heavily suspect she already knows or at least suspects. "You know how you are about tight spaces."
"Oh, merci, Monsieur Gabriel, that 'as to be the sweetest thing you 'ave done all day!" Curie gives you a hug, letting her red hair fall all over your chest.
She does know you well.
"Don't worry about it, Curie."
Staying like that a little longer, it is her who eventually speaks up again. "I quite like the way you pronounce my name, Monsieur Gabriel," she whispers, hands meeting behind your back to entwine their fingers with each other.
"What a coincidence, I like the way you pronounce mine, too," you smile.
"Per'aps we should spend a little time together. Without clothes."
"Perhaps," you agree.
And just like that you proceed to christen your new lab.
County Crossing wasn't much, truth be told, and mudfruit farming was backbreaking work, as was any kind of farming out in the wastes, but it was honest, simple. For Dillan and Jill, it was everything they'd ever know, their humble abode and the small bit of farmland they could take care of together, the old destroyed house and the lake next to it in possession of their extended families since before the Great War, as the stories went.
It was far from easy, sometimes, to hold onto their land, but they'd made it this far and they wouldn't stop if they had a say about it. They'd scared off any bloodbugs that'd come their way and kept quiet enough none of the supermutants nearby had deigned to visit them, too, so they had to be doing something right.
Every day was hard labor, but they had each other and that was enough.
So they didn't think anything unusual on that day, either, Dillan working the fields and harvesting mudfruit while Jill carefully used their water pump- they had to be careful about how much they used so their well didn't just dry out, it happened all the time to places like theirs. It'd been quiet, with little wind for once.
Then Jill happened to look up. She screamed. Dillan rushed to her side, his trusty pipe pistol at hand, but what she saw had it slide straight through his limp fingers, falling to the ground.
A massive swarm of bugs, a part of his brain recognized. The part not gibbering in terror. He could see the flies, the spiders… But also the bloodbugs, the bloatflies, the…
There were too many to count. They had to run, they-
The giant mass of bodies surged, covering the sky to blot out the sun and spreading over the ground faster than they could keep up with. They were surrounded, everything around their farm completely filled.
Then she appeared. A black mass of bugs in the shape of a woman. "This is County Crossing," it spoke, voice reverberating with the buzzing, chittering bugs all around them.
It was a droning, all-encompassing sound. Dillan doubted he'd ever forget it for a day in his life henceforth.
"Am I wrong?" It asked.
"T-this is County Crossing," he pleaded, hoping to whatever or whoever would listen that this thing was not going to kill them. Or worse.
"In the evening, men will come. You will agree to what they say," the shadow of bugs continued uncaringly.
"Whatever you say!" His voice was hysterical now. Jill was breathing quickly, he didn't think she would be able to say anything.
It looked at her anyway, tilting its head at an angle. It would be a lie to say he'd ever seen anything so oddly disturbing before in his life.
"M-my wife agrees too!" He threw out in an act of unbridled bravery, unasked.
The bugs surged and he thought he'd doomed them both, to be scoured off the face of the earth with nothing left to prove their existence… But then he didn't die horribly, shivering and covering his face.
He looked up and- there was nothing.
He looked down. He'd pissed himself, he noted, numb, like he was some observer looking at what was going on from the outside. As had Jill.
He stretched a shivering hand out to her, to confirm that they were alive.
She took it.
When the Minutemen came, Dillan and Jill swore to the heavens they would do anything they wanted. They'd have done anything, too.
The Commonwealth, as it had come to be known these days, was no stranger to changing weather by any measure, though it had kept to a relatively constant temperature over the last two centuries and change; the radiation beating down around most of its breadth and the shifting ocean currents and even the landscapes reshaped by the nuclear blast had kept truly large amounts of moisture from it and the overall temperature more or less the same for most of the area it covered.
That was, overall hot and dry, with a mild sprinkling of deadly radiation every time the wind came from the south-west.
That said, different regions had a notably changing level of weather, of course. Closer to the coast, things generally got colder, while there was some actual water in the various rivers snaking through the land, one of the few things enabling life in the area at large, and especially so the further one wandered south.
Which generally meant irradiated swamps and massive swarms of bloodbugs falling upon any unwary travelers that wandered near their breeding grounds to donate their bodies' insides to the cause of their reproduction.
However, the usual rad-laden storms ravaging the countryside had been absent for weeks now by anyone's recounting, while something quite… unusual happened, up in the north.
There was water… Coming from above. It was clean, too.
People were freaked out at first, of course. This wasn't anything anyone had ever seen, though the smarter, educated locals had an inkling, especially those that had read some of the books up in Concord.
It was… raining. Apparently that wasn't anything unusual back before the War, when the world had looked so very different.
The plants, too, were growing at a rapid pace now that they had some more solid amounts of water coming down around their roots, and within days the brown, craggy earth was covered in green. Almost as if they'd just been waiting for this, grasses and trees invigorated themselves, sprouting and growing actual leaves, while bushes and other plants began growing with a vengeance.
Bloodleaf even started growing in more than puddles and similar, the plants so very greedy for water but demanding in how shallow it had to be becoming a great deal more commonplace.
The north-west of the Commonwealth was not the only place seeing unusual weather, however. While some short-lived violence preceded widespread acceptance of this new state of affairs among the populace, things were turning out a lot more… Tumultuous, down south.
The sky was churning, dark clouds gathering and growing with no end in sight. The sun was completely blocked off and a cold, piercing chill made itself known to anyone in the area.
There was no wind, instead the only thing coming from the skies above was… Snow. Irradiated moisture, forced into crystalline growths by the cold, fluttering ever downwards until it hit the ground with no end in sight.
The Children of Harold learned several things that day. Many of them involved cold fingers and toes and the deaths thereof, as well as the pains of holding naked rituals in the middle of what may well be described as a localized winter.
It would not stop, either. The Great Enemy, the Legions of Steel, walked in unison with this life-ending threat, their cold metal bodies at home in this cold air, and their determination would prove not to be the only thing that would grow in spite of the cold, as the source of their power, the power of Atom, still glowed strongly within each of them.
And at the heart of the Glowing Sea, where they sourced it from to let Harold's Spawn overcome this trial for however long they needed to.
Reed Wahl, the slimy little fucker, is not only one of your more handy souls to be swinging around in the background and using his power, the man was also one of the leading designers of the Thinker, one of the perhaps most impressive artificial intelligences you could've thought of before meeting her simply because of how primitive the technology at her base is.
That's not to say you respect him for his knowledge or abilities, of course; what he ultimately did was really just slapping a bunch of computer parts and Adam together to construct the mainframe the Thinker is based upon. The actual programming was done by another guy entirely, a guy that Reed won't shut up about if you let him talk for longer than ten minutes at a time.
What you're getting at is that, although the things he is passingly competent with are kind of related to using machines to predict the future, he really isn't an expert on the software side of things, much to your sufferance. The age-old division between software and hardware striking once again, you suppose.
Still, a small change in your teleporters and a few of the robots you use in the field lets you tease out a little more efficiency in this aspect without any undue lowered capacities in other direction. He does come in handy, ol' Reed, time and again.
Your new lab space is done, as is Curie, who needs to take an hour or two to recover from the level of pounding she just received, so you can move on to the next step of your plan- that of retrieving further samples for study and, possibly, modification. You already have the dead bodies of the three cultists you murdered earlier inside the new labs, of course, but while they're an interesting enough bunch from a biologist's perspective, you want something a little more… intriguing.
Specifically, that stupid sapling they created by jamming a branch from Harold' tree into the ground in the middle of nowhere. You aren't sure exactly how it works, but from what you do know it's somehow capable of generating a damn forest within days, so if you could somehow harness its power towards your own ends…
Well, if you manage to make those radiation plants stop spreading that shit, anyway. You want this thing as a convenient terraforming tool, not a weapon of mass destruction that only works on half the stuff in this dimension anyway.
… Well, you don't exactly mind having more war crimes up your sleeves, but casually reforming the wasteland into having an actual ecology beyond molerats and bloodbugs eating people.
That of course brings you to an issue of sorts- you know the approximate location of that sapling, as well as that a bunch of crazed druid cultists are running around near it. Teleporting yourself back towards the forest's vicinity, now covered in a thin layer of snow with frozen ground underneath it, you quickly survey the 'battlefield'; your robots have been doing good work, though the forest has been defending itself with the unbending violence only a bunch of trees are capable of.
That is, not much, but while the front has been pushed back a good bit, burnt-out holes in the ground denoting where it was blasted apart with energy weapons and plasma discharges to thoroughly sanitize the larger trees down to the roots, the rest of the tree line has instead moved… Upwards.
Once they realized they couldn't push back hard enough, they just decided to build up vertically instead, you suppose. Hence you're now looking at very tall trees indeed, grown to accommodate several stories' worth of height.
A quick jump confirms that the plants have adapted to this in various ways, too, including a bunch of glowing moss and fungi that give the forest some green mood lighting, in essence. If it wasn't such a giant pain, it'd almost be pretty.
Now, every time a trees falls, barbed vines lash out from all directions, increasing 'casualty' rates and slowing the rate of progress your robots are able to achieve to a crawl. While they very much can keep the forest from encroaching any further out of the Glowing Sea, they also can't push it back as effectively as a barrage of deadly plant life springs to life wherever they immolate or ionize anything in sight.
It's… Actually kind of impressive, how these guys managed to slow your engineering down like this. Oh, you're still pushing the trees back, to be sure, and if you just waited for a while you would be getting somewhere just fine, but your robots are massive killer machines that are currently being fought back by barely animate plants right now.
Good thing you're here to change that, then.
Well, while you aren't exactly used to running around inside forests and such, being a very much urban creature at your very core, your animal forms do come with a few very helpful instincts and body structures that make slipping right into the green a cinch, a wolf's natural speed and agility most helpful in your endeavour.
What, normal wolves wouldn't be able to jump from one tree to another in a mad dash to avoid the various exploding plant pods and clouds of pollen and nectar released at its passing through sheer speed and momentum or run sideways and upside down along enormous branches?
Nah, that sounds like totally normal wolf behaviour to you.
You make your way into and through the massive forest easily enough, at any rate, quickly penetrating the territory lying before you. for all that the dense vegetation is an impediment to most intruders, it can't actually hold you back in any meaningful way now that you're making an effort, so it's smooth sailing as you follow through on the location you identified as the most likely one to be your target.
Of course, you do manage to find yourself a few guards midway through, as it seems even zealotry isn't enough to just turn all your enemies into utter and complete idiots (if only it was that easy), but you evade them all the same, easily slipping past both the normal cultists and, well…
Turns out the ones that become more plant than person and don't stop there? Well, they don't exactly have to stop moving around, either, which honestly makes you wonder just what the fuck is even going on with how these parasite plants work.
Still, however, a low-flying bird such as yourself as a barn owl (to better fit in with some parts of the environment) can make its way through this without any issues, too. Suck it cultists, there's a reason you're revered as a deity yourself!
Sure, pretty much solely by your past victims that are quite thoroughly dead and to some extent by the demons on Thule as some kind of demigod, as demon lords are sometimes seen by some parts of their society, but it counts, dammit.
Anyway, the one thing that finally has you slow your advance through the pollen- and spore-laden, mined, guarded and highly radioactive forest is, what else could it be, your target… You think, anyway. There's a bunch of primitive houses grown out of and into several trees at what you suspect to be the heart of the forest, so you turn into a raven for the coloration alone, darting along in-between enormous tree trunks as you observe the simple settlement.
It seems the Children of Harold are revering each of their number that has achieved any significant amount of plantification, even as most of those in the advanced stages have lost all capacity for speech and, partially, movement. There's only a few of the completely wooden ones with the rest of the cult, though, and you guess the mental changes are sufficient to have them just prefer running around the forest on their own or something.
They don't have any blood to speak of anymore (you already checked), so you don't really care about them, if you're to be honest. At least not personally, and that's really all that matters to you.
This deep into the forest, of course, there is just about no snow actually hitting the ground, the trees and their wide branches building a very solid roof far above the tree huggers that you're here about. It's still pretty damn cold, though, as it damn well should be by now, and you don't see nearly as much exposed skin as you suspect you would have a day or so ago.
You spot one of the wooden comrades handing another cultist a handful of seeds, seeds that the one in question immediately throws down their hatch and swallows. Then, falling to their knees, the sucker convulses and writhes, the 'clothes' made of bark shifting and growing to cover more of them.
Well, that does explain that, at least.
In the middle of the makeshift village, protected by the Children of Harold and everything they could put in the way around it, you finally see the sapling you're here for, the one plant grown out of the branch they took from the original. It's easy to recognize on account of the red leaves and blooms, as well as the… leftovers… from their big 'ritual' to accelerate its growth.
By, naturally, feeding a bunch of living people to it, just like Harold apparently was parasitized by a tree himself and all. It's kind of obvious when they literally leave the skull lying around for some reason.
It is a chonky little tree, isn't it? And it will definitely be one giant bitch to carry out of here, which you will need to as your teleportation signal is still interrupted in here.
Okay, time to do this. Turning into your own shadow, you sneakily slither onward, closing in on the blood-covered tree thingy that, on closer inspection, may or may not be entirely plant-like- it's slow and almost sluggish, but you can see a certain amount of movement in the blood inside of it, suggesting it has something approaching a circulatory system as it would be found inside, say, a mammal.
A mammal you would be able to eat. In theory, of course, purely as a thought experiment.
Like any good theory, you naturally want to see about disproving it, for only in the absence of proof against it can a theory be proven correct, so you need to try it and do what you can to do just that. The scientific method for dummies, ladies and gents, no need to get up and clap.
And if you succeed, well, that's some convincing grounds upon which to say your theory may have been on to something, simple as that.
You creep up the creepy tree's roots, noting their texture- much as you can't feel it right now anyway. They're smooth and wide, almost reminding you of tubes of a sort- it wouldn't surprise you if this thing was somehow connected to the rest of this forest, which would in turn allow the cultists to influence one through the other somehow.
You're presupposing they have some kind of power over plants, but that's pretty much proven true already. You just lack detailed knowledge at this point.
Now then, you will need to take a sample of this thing, of course, probably break off a branch just for the DNA if nothing else, and test that hypothesis of yours, for one.
So you turn back to normal amidst the thing's branches, a shadowy figure amidst the dim red light filtered through this mutated thing; choosing a piece of wood of middling size, you grasp it with clawed hands, using their sharpness to carve into the resilient material and, in essence, scratching it off.
You're left holding it aloft in short order, thick red life-juice staining your fingers as you find out this thing does, indeed, bleed, and taking the time to lick the stuff off for a quick moment. It does taste surprisingly nice, kind of syrup-y and a little thicker than normal human blood for all that the normal notes are all there.
That was easy enough, you suppose. You eye the spot where some of it is now lazily leaking amidst smoothly flowing bark, red and not actually pulsing but it's coming out all the same.
Well, time to be adventurous about where you stick your face into! That's the core charm of being a vampire, really, far more so than you would've thought after first rising from the grave. But enough about the many new and exciting things you've decided to put into your mouth, it's time to add 'literal tree' to that list.
Leaning in, your pilfered wood grasp tightly in your hand, you open your mouth wide, angling it so you can get a good grip, and drive your teeth into splintering wood. It tastes… Like wood, just with some blood in there, and your supernatural bloodsucking power does seem to activate… Mildly accelerating the flow of that blood to you, but it's still glacial.
You also note a group of people approaching, but you fucking refuse to let go now. You are eating this tree, anyone else's opinions be damned- if they want to stop you, they can experience the joys of having gravity reversed on them for half a minute to return to the ground at terminal fucking velocity.
There you are, hanging in the crown of a tree that a bunch of people were ritually fed to and slurping up the blood that's replaced its sap, waiting and watching on as a group of about two dozen crazed cultists approaches to see how you defile whatever they consider it, a deity or some kind of sub-deity or whatever.
What even is your life. Unlife. The idea is clear.
Well, nothing in for it. You aren't stopping the suck before the tree stops producing vaguely chewy, fresh-tasting juice, so they'll just have to die once they inevitably make a fuss. Simple as that.
The clearing around the tree crowned in red is fairly wide and you don't immediately stick out in your current position, so the partially-plantified Children of Harold just kind of vacillate into your direction, a few more joining the main group every other moment- it looks like this is somewhat of a community event, after all.
Still, you're getting somewhere with this. You're drinking an almost absurd amount of blood very slowly, making for a rather laid-back experience, even as you just wait around for the inevitable screams.
"Oh Great Harold, Prophet of our Great Father Atom, hear the prayers of your lowly disciples! We are but mud and water to you, that a great Tree may grow out of our worthless sacrifice!" See, this is why you don't really like religions. People have to put themselves down to appease whatever imaginary deity they're praying to all the time, which rather defeats the point; if you were a god, you'd be praising your worshippers and trying to let them live up to their own full potential in your name instead of making them feel as small as possible.
No, you are not at all salty about that convent of nuns you were stuck in when you were little that kept on insisting you had to be 'punished' through not being allowed clothes or freedom of movement as they jerked you off for days on end. Getting out of that one was a bitch and a half, especially as you then ended up first arousing the attention of a certain bunch of policewomen while doing so.
Elementary school was hard, okay?
Anyway, back to the present- the cultists still haven't noticed you, so you get to observe as they… Strip. Bark plates just carried as clothing instead of grown on and brown robes are discarded, despite the low temperatures right now, revealing a few more details about how these guys work- there's plenty of wooden fingertips and toes, with some of the stuff going all the way to the backs and palms of their hands, but it seems like the cultists actually start to fuse with the parasitic plants from the ends of their limbs and go from there, after all.
Besides that, there's a lot of busty chicks among them. Did they gather the hotties for this thing they're doing here or what?
"To your great countenance we bring our pathetic seed, that you may share a measure of your wisdom with us! Harold! Oh, Harold!" You think this preacher guy may just nut into his pants from how he's talking at this point. "Grant us the wisdom of Atom that we may turn back the foe at our gates!"
The hot chicks, mostly naked by now, are kneeling before the tree with the leader of this 'congregation' standing in front of it, both his hands raised. They're bending over, getting on all fours still staring up at the red leaves worshipfully as the guys behind them jostle for position.
And crap, seriously? Are they going to have a ritual orgy right in front of you? Like, not to knock on faith-fueled orgies, of course, but…
You have a flashback. You can feel it coming. You're back in that room, with your hands tied behind your back and the gag and blindfold on, completely at the mercy of the strange women that live in a convent and keep on saying something about 'exorcising' you and 'putting you back onto the right path'…
There's a reason you didn't become a cape and immediately get yourself a bondage whip for a weapon if only as a joke. Some things just stay with you for a long time and all that, even when you're beyond them and have been since forever.
Mildly annoyed, you throw the tree branch in your hand at the guy that's still going on about how much better this Harold guy is than everyone else, presumably waiting on giving the command to mount the chicks raising their hips up in the air eagerly in that brainwashed cult manner you're familiar with.
… Look, you've seen a lot of naked women in your time, it'd be weird if you couldn't read their body language to some extent.
Back to the preacher, he's thrown to his own knees by the hit to his head, dazed. You lazily wave a hand, telekinetically pulling the thing right back to yourself, and even the slowest and dumbest among them can follow it back with their eyes to, finally, catch a glimpse of yourself.
You still aren't stopping your drinking.
"Heresy!" One of the guys out back calls, pulling a seed gun on you. You snap your fingers for effect as you crush him into the ground as a grotesque, splintered warning to the others.
"A prophet!" One of the women counters, not being smote for speaking up. "Atom hath spoken!"
"It's a traitorous false prophet!"
"It's salvation in the flesh!"
Things devolve into a shouting match between the male and female cultists, but hostilities bubble to a frothing, seething anger against one another when the preacher garbles something about the Foe of Atom and two of the completely morphed tree-people come in to back the guys up, though the naked cultists, for all that they're surrounded, are livid enough about you being besmirched like this their sheer agitation might just level things out again.
… No, you still aren't done eating. How much blood does this thing have? It has to be generated somewhere at the base of the trunk or something, you can see it flowing upwards from there.
You sigh into the wood still stuck inside your mouth, rolling your eyes at how easily and eagerly these people get into hissy fits about how to interpret whatever 'signs' they're seeing, going so far as to completely break out into civil war between one another, but still… May as well make use of this, assuming you can point whatever issues they have at someone else reliably.
Okay, what do you have that can steer a bunch of religious fanatics that doesn't require you to stop trying to eat this tree?
… Dammit, you'll need him, won't you?
You would sigh in exasperation if you weren't still running on empty after your last one. Ah well, can't be helped, he's still your the most suited tool you have for this situation, so you breathe him out despite your (considerable) reservations.
Down below, the silver mist you exhaled coalesces, gathering in one area for one Father Simon Wales to make his appearance, accompanied by a couple of Bondage Demons you also draw out of your aura to go with him and ensure he doesn't go and get himself killed the moment you lose track of him, their favored metal chains rattling in anticipation already.
"Sons and Daughters, hold your weapons! For the Face of the Lord has graced us!"
"Heretic!"
"The word of the Prophet!"
"Kill him!"
"Kill them!"
You proceed to ignore the carnage that follows, Wales going on to preach as the women downstairs murder their former allies and community, your Bondage Demon minions keeping them from from really fighting back effectively through abuse of your massive aura reserves and regeneration, letting you just have them create massive amounts of their namesake weapon.
Also, naked chicks killing a bunch of people is oddly hot, not gonna lie.
You continue drinking while you instruct Wales to go and recruit whom he can and 'protect the believers', which means he ends up leading the angry, now half-naked women (once they throw on some clothes, given it is pretty cold thanks to you) back into the rest of the cult encampment.
Explosions and massive balls of chains follow.
A couple giant trees go down, felled somehow, and at least one deathclaw is around for a short time as you identify the creature's roars, then dies.
There's more explosions before Wales returns, stroking his white beard and kneeling respectfully some distance from the tree you're still working on, a bunch of women gathered across the borders of the clearing.
"Oh Lord, your Will has been done. None yet live in this place that do not understand your Grace. None would see reason among half the populace, but they have been moved on to the next life to earn their salvation."
It is then, just after you semi-accidentally took over this cult by force, that the tree finally dies, the steady stream of lifeblood ceasing to flow and a soul being deposited into your collection fluidly.
Which, yes, is a thing. You weren't quite sure, it was really indistinct and hard to see with your soul observatories, but this tree actually had a soul of its own.
One that you own now.
Finally pulling your face out of the hole you kind of made (you have to unhinge your jaw a little more, too, to get your teeth out), you take a sweet, sweet moment of joy from closing your mouth again. Any living person would have lockjaw ten times over by now. "Good work. You may return to tend to your other duties, Father," you nod, paying a minimum of professional respect to him.
He is reliable, gotta give him that much. That doesn't stop you from breathing him straight back in at full speed, but still.
"Now, what to do about the rest of you…" You eye the all-female congregation of former Children of Harold staring at you intently.
In the end, getting the cultists that apparently hooked onto your mere presence in a moment when that one guy asked for a sign from 'Atom' to clean things up a bit and await your return.
But first, you do, of course, take a few samples from several of the more… intriguing plants around, including seeds and gathered pollen the Children have on hand, and the tree whose soul you just ate is naturally being torn out of the earth by a pair of quickly summoned Pinkies, the sloth-like bruisers still needing you to just coot the thing's root at some point to get it off and ready for transport.
The root system was… extremely wide, if not necessarily as deep, which actually tells you a lot about what kind of plant you're working with here. Root systems are very indicative of where and how their origin takes nutrients from, just to point out the obvious.
Biology, ladies and gents. One of those things everyone and their mother seems to be ignoring here on Earth Fallout.
But anyway, time to investigate all of this stuff in depth and figure out a permanent solution for this forest you're looking at (and any possible forests of your own you may end up pissing all over the landscape).
You have eternity to live through, but why is every day still so damn busy?
"Hey Curie, we have work to do!" You find the redhead scientist making notes on her work computer, a massive supercomputer you put into the lab mostly for how and to let yourself feel like you actually know a thing or two about IT (not that you don't, but you really aren't an expert in terms of computer sciences by any stretch of the imagination, you're more of a hardware guy yourself), but she took to it like a fish to water- an unsurprising development you suppose, given she used to be a robot and all and has a lot more hands-on experience with how this stuff works than most people would.
That or she's secretly coding an 8-bit game into her notes and results on how what kinds of toxins interact with what other substances, particularly each other and so on and so forth- you've never really been good with doing actual empirical science as opposed to just slapping stolen results together and improvising from there, it's just way too much work- but you're confident she's actually doing research.
Considering your usual practices… Yeah.
"Oh, what 'ave we in the test chambers?" Curie asks, tippy-tapping on her console to bring up one of the storerooms slash test sites you set aside for the holding of new subjects. "That are quite many mutated organisms, Monsieur Gabriel. Should we begin with the former 'uman ones or the large tree-like animal?"
"I'm fine either way, as long as we figure out how to get rid of all these mutated plants effectively," you shrug. "There's a… pretty big outbreak of them near the Glowing Sea. And if we ca-"
"Let us investigate 'ow they spread and if we can make use of the same mechanism, oui," the former robot completes your sentence for you. In a sense. "I will activate the DNA analysis cameras post-'aste. Truly a marvel, they are, even if the zoom is insufficient to analyze unicellular organisms. Just imagine the possibilities!"
You aren't sure whether to consider those possibilities incredible or terrifying, knowing what you do about how Curie created her panacea in that vault. What else could (or would) she do with casual ease of access to the genetic code of whatever bacteria are swirling around?
You have your tools, you have your facilities and you have ample amounts of samples at your fingertips. Just about nothing is really stopping you from organizing a large-scale analysis of every little part of the fucked-up little ecosystem those bumbling madmen cobbled together by messing with powers beyond their understanding.
Literally. You sincerely doubt any of them really understood what they were sitting on, nor that many of them would have cared to even if they could have.
Working through the supposed functions of the (literally) bloody tree at the center of it all, it had some kind of way to modify the DNA of other nearby plants, imparting these changes and, critically, making them pass those on to others. Combine this with the curious radiation absorption for growth that you have observed already and you get the recipe for what the Children of Harold managed to do- presumably they just put the tree there, then repeated their 'rituals' that caused it to do its own thing and create the Glowing Forest, as it has come to be called, in waves of self-replicating plants just growing like weed inside a professional drug dealer's setup.
You would know, you have enough stolen memories of just that happening.
While the exact ways this whole thing works is… Still questionable to some extent, you have been able to build a device that, basically, does the same thing as the tree would have done while still alive, though not quite as easily or on the fly; it's shaped like some kind of prehensile three-fingered hand that can be triggered to 'grab' onto small objects.
By sticking seeds or similar into the thing, you can essentially reprogram their DNA, though not quite on the fly given the sheer complexity of the operations involved. It also takes a good chunk of ADAM to make it work, but you don't exactly lack the stuff, either.
The real challenge lies in the extreme number of variables you have to plug in, beginning with the seeds you use to begin with themselves. You aren't some braindead cultist that blindly stimulates a semi-sentient plant in the hopes of not being sacrificed to it next… Or in the hopes of just that. Whatever.
On the flipside, you can implement a lot more precise changes, and by fiddling with the samples you got from what the Children actually did produce through sheer trial and error you have managed to isolate a few rather useful gene expressions, including ones that wouldn't even be possible without FEV or ADAM in the equation somewhere.
And since you're now in your element, modifying the technology ('technology') of others without all the really complicated stuff you prefer to just not do, you have a little time to… Get creative with those genetic codes.
Meaning, radiation is now your friend. "Test Eighty-Three F is a success. Looks like they can really absorb radiation to grow and then metabolize it for further productivity without re-releasing it in some form," you note as you watch over the sensors inside one of the many, many testing chambers you have for this exact kind of thing.
"A full success across the board. Remarkable," Curie breathes. You get the distinct impression that scientific progress like this isn't so much euphoric for her as it is downright arousing, from how she's rubbing her thighs together and flushing a little. "'ow fares the machinization project?"
You grimace. Yeah, that. "Not too well. Even if we can shape them like we want, creating new shapes and species from nothing is still time-consuming and our subjects are still plant- living beings. Much harder to turn those into robots, the mechanics just don't translate directly and while I'm sure there's a way to pull this off…"
"… it is simply not worth the effort when robots are there already, non?" Your companion smiles. "Per'aps a project for another time, when resources are scarce."
Unlikely as that is for the time being, she does have a point.
"'ow about the other sub-projects?"
"Replicating the cultist plants is easy enough, even if there's no real use for the parasitic ones." And you can see it before your inner eyes; the Children mess with the tree, discover the parasite seeds and interpret them as a divine commandment to 'become one with the wood'. Damn cultists. "A few modifications are easy enough to make, including a seed grenade thrower I made on the side to see if it's viable."
"Is it?" Curie asks, curiously peering up at you on account of being of average height for an adult woman.
"To an extent," you shrug. "I wouldn't replace my usual weapons with them, but the seed fragmentation grenades explode into seed shrapnel that grows into smaller seed bombs by feeding on the target, assuming it's an organism of some kind. I think it would count as a war crime in some dimensions."
"I see. Viable enough to consider it another success. I am so very excited!" Curie does a little twirl.
You pat her head, something she leans into happily. Always nice to work with people you can agree with, right?
"There you are!" Small footsteps announce the coming of a certain little terror. "No fair to go and do science without me! No fair no fair no fair!"
You act quickly, modifying Cupcake's personal gravity to make her jump into the air and stay stationary. "So much for her not finding this place," you grouse playfully.
"It 'ad to 'appen," Curie agrees with a smile. "Addison, this is our secret base, so nobody is allowed to know about it, understand?"
"But I wanna be in on the secret!" The lab coat clad pint-sized chemist flails her limbs.
"Yes, but if you know, you can't tell anyone, see? Else we won't let you inside again," Curie chides.
Man, she really has a hand for Cupcake wrangling, doesn't she? Also, where's her robot minder this time?
Plant Matters: Modification of plant seed DNA by way of a handheld device that can be programmed to inflict various changes
Can be used on any seeds, spores, pollen etc.
Can implant radiation absorption to fuel explosive plant growth that consumes the absorbed radiation
Can modify plants to grow into various technologies
The Revere Satellite Array was, in Taylor's opinion, one thing above all else.
It was dirty. Covered in filth. Her sensibilities didn't get offended by gore easily, true, but the sacks of meat hung up by the inhabitants dripping blood and meaty bits from various animals (including humans) just gave it all a distressingly strong stink of decaying flesh and organs.
It was also gathered bugs and other vermin to feed on it all, which made her part in this easier.
The nice people at that place called County Crossing had been quick to accept their joining the Minutemen, so she felt they should be rewarded with the removal of the creatures here, so close to their home. Which was why Taylor was there, overseeing the spinning of silk into sturdy ropes and envisioning the placement it would take.
The supermutants were wandering around high satellite towers, tromping through walkways that'd seen better days; only a couple were down on the ground, accompanied by a mutated dog of some kind.
Decided on a plan of action, she nodded.
Taylor took aim with her rifle, squeezing the trigger in a short sequence that had the enemies on ground level burst apart into charred cadavers. Her bugs were on them in moments, salvaging what souls the creatures still had, as the ones further up yelled and screamed their aggression out.
It was almost embarrassing to watch. Almost. the real embarrassment came when they were caught in her traps, laid out sneakily just moments prior, ankles catching in sticky ropes and triplines dropping sturdy nets from above.
She succeeded in immobilizing all of the big dumb brutes, half of them hanging from the towers upside down and the other half tied up too thoroughly for even their strength to rip free. Now all Taylor had to do was to scourge this entire place and-
One of the towers creaked, the agitated movement of her victims tied to it destabilizing the entire structure.
She'd need to start eating with them.
You wonder if implementing a public fitness program of some sort would be a good idea to reduce chances of obesity issues among the populace… Seeing as this is still America, after all. It's also a good way to distract yourself of the now all-female forest cult that seems to be considering you a prophet of some kind.
The city of Concord, as some were making it a point to proudly call it, was host to many things most would have called wondrous before seeing them for themselves- if they hadn't just called anyone describing them a whacko nutjob and pulled a gun to get them to back off slowly.
That was just how most wastelanders were.
All the same, now that they were living it, the dream of safety was changing how people thought and acted, whether it was in how they were a little friendlier, a little more open, the hard edges of wasteland life ground away under the luxury of guaranteed food and housing for everyone or the fact most people living in Concord just didn't have much reason to pull out their weapons anymore as long as they stayed within the wall around the place.
If anyone made trouble, the Minutemen were supposed to come and sort 'em out, though as before everyone was welcome to defend themselves with a couple dozen bullets if it came down to it. And it was a little more likely for that to happen in some parts of town- the markets and the 'front' areas to the south and east where strangers came in and out.
But in the residential districts and the rest of the city as a whole? People didn't want no trouble and they didn't made no trouble. If something came up, an argument growing hot or stuff like that, one of the boys with the cowboy hats usually wasn't far, to poke his head in and politely ask if there was a problem.
That usually was that right there. Most folks in Concord were there because they wanted peace and quiet, in the end, and anyone that didn't think so was usually sorted out right quick. You didn't fuck around with the Minutemen- they were your friends and would help you out if you had trouble, but if you made any serious kinds of it, well…
Those fancy muskets of theirs weren't no decoration. And that's if you were lucky, any folks that really pissed 'em off were carted right off to Sanctuary. The kids were already afraid of that word, 'cause anyone would tell 'em they didn't listen to their parents, they'd go to Sanctuary and never come back.
What nobody wanted to admit was… It wasn't just the kids. But hey, everyone was really open and clear about this; Sanctuary was where they put the worst of the scum, the raiders and the other psychos they caught. You didn't fuck around, you didn't have to care about Sanctuary. You did and, well, it depended.
You were having a problem, the Minutemen would look into it. Really look into it, clear it up hard and fast. If you went and wasted their time, though, and you could've known better, they cut your deliveries- half rations. Not that bad, not for anyone that knew real hunger, but it stung, 'specially if it was about something stupid.
You were disruptive, they took you aside, had a talk. Figured things out. Or got you figured out if you was the problem. If not, they talked to others and they better had listen, because the boys in brown could make ya life difficult if they had to.
They didn't do that, of course. Most didn't want to and most would get shit on themselves if they tried. But you was a shit guy that caused problems for everyone else? Everyone else shit right back on you for double and they didn't stop 'em.
They always made it clear why they did what they did, too. The Minutemen wanted everything to be nice an' peaceful. Again, they were your best friend unless you fucked up and didn't try to fix it. The only time they got nasty.
You killed a citizen and you did it because anything else than they were about to kill you or someone else? They'd have a hard talk with you. Sort you out. If they didn't…
Sanctuary.
But all in all, that was all just fine with people. Everyone got their own justice, nobody got fucked over for anything stupid- and if people complained about the ghoul moving into Concord, they got a shrug and nothing else. 'If they turn feral, they get shot. 'Til then, they're just another face'.
Housing was arranged, but you could move around if you wanted. Couple neighbourhoods were ghoul-only, couple were mixed, couple were smoothskins only, so nobody had any right to complain; if they wanted to live without any kind of person, they could just do that.
And the couple people that raved about ghoul being monsters, they got shown how hard a Minuteman could put a guy down- not on themselves, ya doofus, with targets and all- so that they knew that if a ghoul fucked up, they got the same treatment as they if they got violent for no reason.
Simple as that.
But back those wonders, other than makin' people live together without just beating anyone that mucked up. Back in those days, functioning fridges were a new thing, a hot thing, if you catch my drift. It was real news to most people, that you could just put your tatos in there and it would keep for weeks. Some people were hoarding them just because they could, all of a sudden.
But fridges weren't the only new thing, not by a long shot. People got dozens of things they could buy, all of a sudden, instead of just keeping to the free tato deliveries every family got every week, without fail.
Everyone got a free oven, for fuck's sake. Not using an open fire to cook food was revolutionary. But then you got the microwaves, the mixers, the knife sets, the radios- turns out even if you just give everyone free stuff, they'll still pay for more stuff by themselves. Sure some fine shit panic they made about the commies back in the day.
It felt like, every other minute, some new thing was being added to the big marketplaces, some new drink someone'd discovered, some new product nobody even knew where it came from.
And dammit man, those fryers they sold? They were amazing. 'Specially with the oil. Not everyone could afford it, back then, but fried tato chips? With just a little salt? Chef's fucking kiss, man, it was worth to save up and put your funds together just for that.
So then one day, right, I was just walking around, smiling at anyone that made a face just because I could and I didn't have anything else to do, when I saw this thing, on a building. I was all, 'wait a second', rubbing my hootin' eyes, because I knew what that was.
I asked around, and people were confused, like they always were at the new old stuff at first, but a couple others, they knew what was up, too. The ones that read about before the war, or the guys that were good at scavengin'.
Then the damn giant screen lit the fuck up, there was a news broadcast- I still remember it was about this new plant thing down south, where nobody went that wasn't looking to die, and if I could have, I woulda been crying tears of joy.
They'd brought back damn television. Next thing I knew I was watchin' with everyone else there at the time, there was these really flat screens in that one Minuteman shop was wheelin' out, then they were playing softcore porn sometime before the War- and I knew, then, I was gonna go and apply to be a damn newscaster.
And I damn well did, boyos. That's how I could afford those chips for days on end, 'cause when you're a ghoul, what else are you gonna spend cash on? Hookers? Naw, what are you even gonna feel anymore?
-Interview with a ghoul newscaster about the early days of Concord, 'the Resettlement'
The Chapel: A place of quiet introspection and individual enlightenment, the heart of the Temple facility bears a curious statue watching over its inner sanctum, eternally watchful and protective. Deep under it, hidden beneath secret doors and absolute silence, is a hidden altar with a fire within it that never dies out. A strange sensation overcomes any that enter the room… Adds one soul summoning slot to your current total.
Synergy with The Temple: Allows selected souls to be summoned by those you have given permission to using particular rituals (Requires Divine Magic)
The Mint: An expansion to the Treasury, the Mint is home to the Treasurer, the authority on the topic of wealth and the accumulation thereof within the Soul Palace. Using this facility, you may mint souls into coins, increasing their individual value for trade or use as reagents in certain spells, growing in value the more extreme their moralities are (50 morality = minor increase, 90/10- morality = massive increase)
Synergy with The Treasury The Dungeon: You may sacrifice a soul to heal a vampire that could be affected by the Treasury for half their max HP, rounded up.
The Bloom: A particular area both close to and infinitely distant from the Tree, the Bloom produces a reservoir of mysterious fluids flowing from the plants within it, forming a minor river that leads all the way to the Lake and mixes into it. It enhances the fruit of the Tree feeding from it, granting a 5 to xp roll totals from them.
Synergy with The Farm The Kitchen: Fruit xp rolls do not recive a total bonus and instead are granted 5 to each individual roll within them
The Dark: A space within the Soul palace that is impossible to reach and entirely empty, the Dark cannot be touched nor conceived of beyond the absence of light within it. Until it is activated, it does not exist. However, should a light shine within, it casts the thing that do not exist into contrast, making it possible for them to begin interacting with things that do exist.
Fear The Dark.
The Aqueduct: A series of subterranean waterways and flooded tunnels, the Aqueduct connects the underground areas of the Soul Palace, delivering fresh water to any point of it despite only ever flowing downwards in innumerable small waterfalls. More than just water flows through them, however…
Allows up to three souls to be fused using the River, doubling the lowest rank of any skill two or more have as per normal and adding 1 to it if all three do, additionally allowing any souls with a skill rank of 10 or more to gain an appropriate supernatural perk.
Synergy with The Kitchen: Prepared Fruits may grant up to 10 temporary HP apiece
Okay, so you have a lot of potential here, with the new Treecaster (provisional name) at your fingertips and virtually all the botanical might you could want to project right there for the taking, thanks to the nearly omnipresent irradiation of Earth Fallout being usable as a replacement for super fertilizer, but that doesn't mean you can just use it to ejaculate modified seeds all over the landscape and hope for the best. No, you need… Something special.
Some way to keep control of the results, anyway. It would sure be… Regrettable… If it turned out your creations somehow found a way to make an issue of themselves and you had to completely wipe them out and redo everything repeatedly.
Much better to have automatic ways to correct any issues in the first place. Say what you want, but you want to approach genetic engineering on the scales and depths you are now capable of very, very carefully.
… Technically, the technology you possess would qualify you as a plant-based biotinker, wouldn't it? Well, so would your undead if anyone connected to the PRT back home ever really got a good look at them, just not plant-based anymore.
Which brings you back around to what you are going to do, as you have an idea already. It's kind of obvious in hindsight, really.
"Curie, would you mind finishing up on the prime tree sample and helping me brainstorm ways to improve on it? I'm thinking its nature would lend itself to reanimation as one of my undead, hopefully specialized in plant-related powers for the associations," you request of your lab partner who is currently embroiled in throwing other plant samples at pieces of the tree you murdered in cold blood to see what, if anything, happens.
"Oh, I was 'oping to see the process myself. One moment, I will need to prepare the improvised sensors for this phenomenon," Curie says, previous observation forgotten and subjects (in separate observation rooms) incinerated with a quick press of a button as she types away at the main supercomputer of your research facility. "Is it because it is more alike to an animal than a plant? I remember notes to this end."
"That's it exactly. I'm also hoping the characteristics it exhibited while alive will make it easier to achieve the intended results, as these things usually go with magic."
"Thaumaturgical phenomena," the redhead scientist murmurs distractedly, still not having given up on that.
The sheer, absurdly wide variety of forms and powers demons can take on once again is proving itself to you. You'd been worried for a bit, figuring that things such as plant growth and control may not be, for lack of a better word, 'evil' enough for them, but it turns out you needn't have bothered, after all.
After all, there's plenty of unpleasant things about nature. Stinking carnivorous plants, flowers meant to hypnotize insects and other animals, poisonous ones, thorns, poisoned thorns… And that's without even approaching the topic of dangerous, fetid swamps or dark forests and the like.
In short, there's plenty of themes for demons to work with, even if they were somehow restricted towards them. As they aren't, there's even more plenty of possible trades to be made- infinity has a way of ensuring that and hell, as you know it thanks to your magical access to it, is nothing if not infinite.
And here you always thought hell was other people. Which it still is, arguably, just an infinite amount of them. Demographics, you suppose.
Arranging for a trade is a bit more complicated than just waving a true soul in the wind and screaming about what you want, of course, but as always that's what you have your lawyer for, today taking the form of a meticulously styled middle-aged brunette in the usual business clothes. The glasses are a nice touch, too, though eye candy really isn't what you paid her for when you offered renumeration in exchange for her services.
It takes a little while, during which Curie is bustling all over the summoning room and inquiring about how demons work- an entire topic with more to be said than you even conceive of and you're what passes for an expert on the field around these parts- but before long you have an interlocutor in front of you, having hashed out the specifics of your requirements ahead of time.
What you want is the essence of a demon, plant-related, optimally with some kind of power over forests, with a general tendency towards wide-area control over other possibilities, just to keep the net wide enough you don't miss out on any perfectly workable options.
Interestingly, you could have hired a powerful demon or two to basically sculpt a new ecosystem for Earth Fallout according to your own specifications, which opens up the thought of demon-enabled terraforming as such even, but for the moment you're quite certain you won't need any Flesh Sculptors, Flesh Tearers, Chlorophyll Drivers nor notably powerful Defilers for your plans.
What you end up with instead is, while not necessarily perfect, the best you can get with the elevated worth of your True Soul to haggle with, which is still somewhat considerable. The demonic essence of an Alraune, a catch-all term for a plant-like demon generally rooted in one spot and growing directly out of the ground, is yours, while the soul you're trading out in exchange goes to wherever it is corpulent boar demons take their possessions.
It's all a pretty high-level exchange, relatively speaking. The demon your lawyer got for you is the kind of creature that would be a serious issue for you to fight in close combat thank to immense toughness and physical power and you just realized that that's become how you judge people now.
Dammit, you can't become a musclehead fight junkie, you're a family man now. You have to keep it together.
Anyway, while you would have been ready to sweeten the deal with a small piece of soul artwork, so to say, in the end you don't really need to, the siren call of a true soul too much to resist for the thing you summoned for your bargain. The Alraune whose distilled essence you have on your hands now, on the other hand, would be a pretty powerful thing in any environment where plants are present to begin with, apparently, or any other as long as it would've had some time.
Plant control, growth, manipulation and senses, all over a wide area and with enough oomph behind it to be a considerable kind of threat as far down as the fifty-five to sixtieth-ish layers of hell. Not a bad haul, if you do say so yourself, and the soul you expended was really just one with a somewhat crappy luck-based power to let you hit either much harder or weaker. No great loss on your side of things.
And of course as soon as that's done, Curie is right back at analyzing the traces and recordings of the presence of powerful demons. She really seems to be enjoying living out her sense of inquiry here.
The newly named Woodward doesn't take long to dig its roots into the earth right where you originally removed it from, the corpse of the same tree you sucked dry perfectly able to retake its place and, in a sense, position.
You hear cracking sounds as the newly created undead reabsorbs the roots broken during the first extraction, the rough slam with which you reintroduced it not having bothered it in the slightest. And hey, it better not have, considering you and Curie reinforced it with a few internal layers of ballistic weave and armor plating- being able to ignore organic systems you don't plan on directly using is one of the better perks you get when modifying dead bodies for this reanimation business.
"That work for you?" You ask, peering up at the jagged wood of the thing, no outward changes having been made to its structure.
"It does, it does, thank you," the wizened voice the creature you have decided to dub Woodward replies. You specifically made sure it would be able to use a wide range of voices, too, but for one reason or another it seems your newest minion prefers this one for casual communication. "I have a lot of work ahead of me to convert this entire forest."
"You do," you reply noncommittally. "The robots are still keeping the expansion back, so it won't grow out of control entirely, at least. Do you need anything before I leave you to it?"
Watching the literal grass grow is not necessarily one of your hobbies, after all.
"I will make do, no need to complicate things now," Woodward says, bark grinding against itself as it makes the sounds. "You may want to have a talk with the ladies surrounding us, though."
Yeah. that. You did notice them, of course, but why exactly the female cultists saw the need to act kind of like a pack of wolves is beyond you.
"Right. Okay, listen up everyone, this," you point at your replanted and independently conscious creation (only your second one, but it did come out well), "is Woodward. He's in charge around here for now. Any questions?"
They're all very silent for a long moment, ragged cloth garments swaying in a light breeze now that you aren't forcefully controlling the weather (and instead forcefully returned the temperature to more or less normal). Then they stream into the clearing as one, kneeling in a circle around you in neat rows.
"The Sisterhood of the Woods obeys," one of them says, the rest of them chanting the same after her as one. Jolly, they've found a new name already, too! "What shall be our purpose?"
Uh, shit. You… Don't really want them to infect the rest of your population, but as long as they do as you say… "The Sisterhood is to guard these woods from intruders and foul enemies," you intone with more dramatics than you feel anyone really needs, "until the time comes to emerge. You shall be provided for by the forest as you do for it."
Of course you mentally make sure Woodward will do so, it shouldn't be hard with his powers.
"The Sisterhood of the Woods hears and obeys," the speaker agrees.
""We hear and obey,"" the rest chants, apparently believing themselves to be communing with the spirits or something now.
You'll just, uh, leave them all to it, you guess. You have a Vault to inspect, anyway.
Vault 95, like any other Vault-Tec installation at one point, was originally meant to be a large-scale experiment with plenty of unwitting human test subjects, only for everything to go wrong at some point and the same old story you've heard a couple times now to repeat itself.
It's really either a complete abortion of the, often stupid, experiments or nearly everyone ends up dying so far. You say nearly because Nora actually did survive until she managed to get out of her cryopod and stumbled onto you.
Good times, even if back then you weren't even capable of just lifting yourself free of your own pod when you entered this dimension right inside of it. You get the feeling that maybe you just have a tendency to appear inside of closed spaces a lot, considering every other instance of yourself jumping into a new dimension, but hey- you're fine with that.
And you certainly couldn't have withstood the sun back then, so all the better, really.
Anyway, back to Vault 95. The place was taken over by the Gunners in more recent years, the military-themed band of raiders slash mercenaries apparently using it as an outpost to the far west of their main headquarters, but after the whole murder forest thing happened and actually threatened their position, they packed up and left for less green pastures, according to what your investigation and additionally used magic can tell you.
Specifically to Gunners Plaza, which would make it rather likely for the ones formerly stationed here to be some of the many bloodbags consumed during your storming of it. Small world, isn't it?
Well, the outside installations that used to exist near the entrance to the Vault itself have been aggressively corroded by the plants deciding to grow all over the place, but you can cut through a couple of them to get into the elevator leading straight down easily enough. Once you enter the actual thing, of course, you quickly make your way through it, not real opposition to yourself being present for once.
In the course of your 'unscheduled surprise inspection', you also do find out what this vault was all about; having gathered drug addicts of all kinds and kept them from the objects of their vices, this was an attempt to analyze how they would react to various measures to help them overcome said addictions. Cold turkey, group therapy, community rules… From the scattered diary entries written both on paper and on what few intact terminals remain, you gather they actually built their own little society down here, a bond forged of shared experiences and difficulties having bound them together.
… You quickly hack into a terminal to get one of the doors that lead deeper inside open without some impromptu excavation just because you're at it already, there's mention of a particularly juicy find further in. But to get back to the story, because it's Vault-Tec, this wasn't enough, of course.
Having gathered enough data and observations, an actual sleeper agent they planted amidst the recovering addicts (you couldn't make this up if you tried, that's how wacky these people apparently were), the company behind this experiment revealed a massive stash of all the drugs people had been missing out on for years by that point.
Just to see what would happen. Well, you aren't really a psychologist by any measure, but you could have told them that violence and confusion breaking out would happen, as the trashed rooms and scattered furniture you've come across show.
But none of that really matters all that much now. The people involved are all dead, having murdered each other in a drug-fueled haze of chaotic civil war, but one of the devices Vault-Tec was using to experimentally 'treat' addicts remains… As in, they completely detoxed people in one go.
You find it, too. Most of it just seems to be a bunch of fiddly bits, which at least means you can take them apart to bring out and analyze everything easier. You'd just teleport the entire room as a whole, but your reception this deep underground is still incredibly spotty, hence the old-fashioned method at least until you're up the elevator again.
Come to think of it, this thing probably could've really helped Cait with her whole drug problem that even addictol couldn't deal with. Well, she won't need it anymore, may as well add it to your collection once you've reconstructed the whole room inside Vault 111.
Now how do you work, you little abomination against normal medicinal practices…
The Sisterhood of the Woods did not take long to take to its new tasks, consisting of only those chosen few that possessed the temperament, the will and the destiny to fulfill them. Their new Lord (whether he was to be considered an aspect of the Atom or a separate deity and their former comrades considered vilest heretics was yet undecided) had granted them their new commandments, a great honor as Atom himself, for one, never had done so in any living memory.
Then there was their new leader, the Council of Shadowed Wood having agreed that he should be obeyed. The Tree Of The Atom And Harold, as its full name had been, had been thought of by many to be the long gaze of Atom reaching through His Apostle Harold, but whether or not it remained the same being was questionable- and also irrelevant.
If they were keeping to the old traditions, the Woodward had been awakened by their True Apostle. If they were breaking thoroughly, their new Lord had turned the object of depraved worship bellowed at by inferior versions of the True Word into one of true power, giving it life and purpose.
The act of a God, no doubt.
The Sisterhood's purpose, now, was to steward these woods in His name and under His guidance, his loyal servant speaking in the voices of a thousand men and women directing them upon the true path. Unlike the great before, the plants were not simply there; they reacted to their presence, their every move at times, and accommodated them directly.
No more did the Sisterhood of the Woods scavenge and search for food; when it came time to eat, it grew before their very eyes. No longer did they live in what were caves inside of the great trees they found themselves so fond of; at their Lord's behest, doors and rooms had built themselves within them, great hidden structures within them now.
To pray and prostrate before the great Woodward was a given, of course. A thousandfold of fervent rituals were to be conducted to sing praise to the Lord. And few of the Sisterhood had forgotten His form, tight clothes ill-fitting to hide the broad chest and back of the being looking like a man.
A very, very handsome man. With appealing muscles all over his body, his very gait that of a predator stalking its prey.
Many indeed were the thoughts the sisters had, in their new community. And upon request, the Woodward promised the delivery of a way to abate their lust, too, revealing what the voice of a whispering maiden promised to be a perfect recreation of the Lord's 'tool', grown freely into polished wood within their tree-houses.
And indeed they polished them well. At great length and repetition, that they may be true to the original, for surely the Lord may deign to visit upon them visions of the glory they were touching upon?
Working with Cupcake is always… An experience, that's what you shall call it. No matter how many times you do it, it's always a… fresh and interesting affair.
Mostly in the Chinese proverb sense. The joys of living in a city with big presence of Asian refugees mean you get a feeling for figures of speech like that.
But Chinese curses aside, you very much do need to keep the girl in check and Curie, for some reason, is not helping, instead just watching from the room's entrance as the chemist you 'hired' so long ago haphazardly combines ingredients to observe the results.
At your luck, the redhead gestures for her. "I 'ave found that Addison is much calmer when allowed to 'live out 'er proclivities' on occasion, so she may experiment at 'er own pace as long as she does not ignore safety precautions."
"Just as long as someone keeps an eye on her," you shrug. "She did dismember her previous caretaker and hid the body in a closet that one time."
"Did not!"
"You literally did it, young lady, don't even try to lie," you command sternly.
"Mrgh… That one didn't count!" A bit more forcefully than strictly necessary, Cupcake smashes a mass of wood chips into a vial as she turns around towards you. "And-"
You act faster than her. Also faster than the small explosion going off behind her, blasting apart glass and other ingredients in a wave of heat and light. Your (al)chemist is safe and sound in your arms, of course, having been whirled around and shielded by your back.
"Jeez, this is why you need someone to watch you at all times in the first place," you grumble, patting her head clear of any potential debris. "Are you alright?"
"'m fine. Aura," Cupcake pouts, shamelessly digging her forehead into your abs at the opportunity you gave her.
"Having aura doesn't mean you should risk needing it, m'kay? C'mere, we'll help you get everything that just went boom back together," you soothe her. "What were you trying to do anyway?"
"Originally I wanted to make a better Murderpunch Potion, but now I want to make bombs again! Can I make bombs? Pleeaase?"
"I don't know, what did Curie say about bombs?" You give the ex-robot in question a wry smile.
"I said 'no bombs without protective clothing'," she lectures, joining you in patting Cupcake down for any potential damage and just to tease her. "Really, Addison, what will we do with you?"
"Feed me chocolate strawberries?"
As you said, it's… An experience. Though you also do get to make use of everyone's gathered results to advance alchemy as a craft, so you certainly won't complain.
The most disturbing part about the whole religious reverence for yourself, you think, is in how you cannot conceive of how or why anyone would ever truly revere a higher power than themselves of their own free will. And as you have not really forced anyone to do so, you cannot understand why people would suddenly pray to you for some reason.
Like, you get it, intellectually, but you do not understand it emotionally. And your emotional intelligence has been how you've been navigating the world for so long, it feels weird to suddenly encounter a phenomenon that your first instinctual understanding of things… Cannot understand.
It's really throwing you off, you think. Also, introspection is a bitch. You'd always taken yourself for someone that primarily thinks objectively instead.
It's funny how these things go, really. One moment you're crawling through centuries old vaults, the next you're teleporting back home to play house with the perhaps most literally explosive kid in this dimen- back on Earth Bet, you shall make no promises about Earth Fallout, and then, at the end of the day and just after the sun's finished going down, you're sitting down and sharing insights on life with Isabel.
You're sitting together in one of your many living rooms, yourself in your favored casual clothes (also known as a shirt and a pair of pants, duh) and her in her usual mechanic's coverall, as the two of you just… talk about random stuff that is on your minds, just two people exchanging words and concepts.
In other words, you're communicating. It's kind of nice to do that every now and then and though you can just meld minds with your lovers to much the same effect instead… There's just something about doing it 'manually' that you enjoy, so you're taking the time.
"… And I'm still just… Feeling so bad about the people I killed, even if I know it wasn't really me, but it was kind of my fault and…" The brown-skinned young woman takes a deep breath. "Ada is being so nice to me, despite me being the reason her friends and everyone she really knew died. I don't…"
"You feel like you've done something wrong, but you aren't being punished for it," you finish the thought. Isabel nods. "Well, that's just how guilt is, in the end. Do you think that's what it is, you still feeling guilty over how things turned out with your first try at being a hero?"
"I don't think so," she shakes her head, actually seeming to mean it, too. "I mean, I did go through that, but I had enough time to… I came to terms with all of this stuff. It was unfortunate and I could have done things better, but I didn't really feel like this for a long time, so…"
"Is it Ada, then? Because she doesn't blame you?"
"… It may be, yes." Isabel leans back in her seat, closing her eyes. "I hadn't seen her or anyone in this dimension for so long…"
"It's alright. Now that you've figured it out, you can think about what to do about it." You wave a hand in the general direction of the east, where she spends most of her time with the robot factory and the robots therein- including Ada. "Actually, I had a thought. Seeing how this shook you up a bit, would you like to stay on this Earth this time around instead of coming back to Earth bet again? It'd be temporary, of course, but I thought I'd ask."
"… I think… I think I'm not really sure, actually," she decides after a lengthy moment of thought, sighing. "If you have the free slot I suppose I'll come, if not then I won't. I think that's the fairest way to do this."
"Fair enough," you snort and drop the topic. Seeing how you decide things in the end, it's really all up to you. "You also really need a hobby or something, by the way. I think it'd be good for you to get your headspace out of all the robotics every now and then."
"What, like you with your art?" Isabel smiles, and it's a good smile- you don't think she's a good enough actor to pretend so well you wouldn't notice any remaining unease. "I don't think I ever told anyone, but… I actually used to play guitar, back before… Before."
"Really?" You push yourself up out of your seat. "You should have, I do have a thing about music, too, you know?"
"No, no, I'm really not that good… And I really don't want to be on the internet. Please."
"Mhm…" You smirk at her, making Isabel sweat a bit before you stop. "Ah well, but you still have to play for me. No getting out of that."
"How? I mean, I'd need a guitar and they're…" It seems it is only now that she really considers how you can just have anything you want made made. Easily. "I should've just-"
"Nonsense," you stop any self-recriminations, "even if you're bad, I can just go ahead and teach you, can't I? Wait right here."
In the end, it's downright picturesque. Isabel ultimately has to discard her coveralls and sit with you in her underwear, just so they don't get in the way of her handling her new instrument, but you make sure to look her deep in the eyes every now and then so she look back as you help her shake off her self-admitted rust and play the notes she wants to play.
Again, this is just kind of nice.
There aren't really many places left, you ponder, that actually merit your own, personal attention anymore as such- you'll admit you like indulging that urge explore and find new and interesting enemies to eat, but in the end, the area you are looking to claim as your territory throughout the Commonwealth has been picked clean of such, for the most part.
Oh, sure, if you were to really get into it, Boston itself would still be full of scum and other creatures you'd love to get your teeth into, but up north? Aside from the coastline where you may stumble upon big mirelurk presences, the rest of your presence's reach is fairly small potatoes by this point.
That's not to say you don't have anything interesting left, of course, or that you'll necessarily stop going on your little trips, just that you don't expect to find much more stuff that'll have you jumping like the holograms you just found out of nowhere. That's really just how things are, in the end.
You wonder what's wrong with all those works of fiction about immortals and how they're left behind by the world, unchanging and forgotten, when the real issue you're experiencing here is that the world is too slow to keep up with you instead.
One bullet dodged only for the threat of tedium to hang over your head? Eh, you can always make your own fun even if you do at some point run out of interesting things to find in the area. Or just expand your radius, of course, you've hardly finished everything the Commonwealth alone has to show you.
Speaking of, here you are, approaching a particular building standing out at the side of a more-or-less intact street (as in, it hasn't sunk into the ground so far). Parsons State Insane Asylum, which in itself is indicative of the fuckery you already expect after your experiences with a certain quarry that has been sealed with molten iron and is guarded by a couple thousand heavily armed robots right now.
Because what kind of insane asylum is going to withstand a nuclear blast and then proceed to be guarded by a bunch of people with rifles for some reason? It's not like it's located in any particularly convenient place, geographically, and what would anyone really want inside of it in this post-apocalyptic world?
As you said, something is fucky here. You can almost feel it in the air.
Of course you're being noticed, but for once that's actually within your interests. "Halt! Not a step further!" One of the armed men hails you as you approach the main entrance, gun aimed squarely at your chest. "This place is off limits. Move along."
And here you were hoping for a warm welcome for a change. Maybe some hookers and blackjack, if you got lucky. Is it really so much to ask of the universe to be granted some hospitality every once in a while?
You lick the last bits of blood under your control out of the air, having finished your little snack. These guys were wearing respectable (compared to the usual crap people can get their hands on around here, anyway) armor and wielding actual combat rifles, being part of a little group of mercenaries that actually did mercenary work for a living, but even if you weren't categorically immune against their bullets, you're just so fast, so strong and equipped with so many ways to absolutely butcher them they wouldn't have stood much of a chance either way.
None of them really stood out in terms of taste, either, nearly all of them having been just a little sugary, indicating they were actually somewhat decent people, except one in particular that stood out… Who just so happened to be a pretty horrible rapist specifically going out of his way to search out vulnerable victims amongst the families of his 'comrades'.
Good for him, you guess. You're mostly just amazed none of them got a clue and put a bullet in his head long before you came along.
Anyway, analyzing their newly pilfered memories, you don't get all that much in terms of news, unfortunately; yes, these guys were guarding this insane asylum, but none of them actually knew why, or even who their real employer was. What they did know was who the guy that hired and technically lead them was, though, which nets you a face and a name at least.
A relatively distinctive face, too. Edward Deegan, a ghoul running around in military armor pieces and working for some other guy, best you can make out, though if he ever told anyone who that is it wasn't any of the men you just made a quick dinner out of. He seems to be hanging around a few locations with some regularity when he isn't joining his hired guns, at least, so you could probably find him… If you decide to bother, anyway.
In the meantime, you take a moment to gather the bodies sporting massive bite wounds of yours in one spot and use your phone to order them to be teleported back home. Your life is so much easier thanks to these things, really.
Ah well, now you know there's someone with a vested interest in keeping this building locked down, at least. None of the mercs were ever allowed to go inside, of course, but that doesn't exactly stop you, of course.
Locked double doors just shatter under a casual knock, their sturdy construction in no way sufficient to hold up to your strength, and you step inside. The asylum is quiet, the air dusty with a few hints of human scent when you pay attention.
Following the trail of where a little less dust is covering the ground and a few months- or years-old scents, you soon arrive at an elevator. There doesn't seem to have been any activity of note aside from this path for… Well, long enough you're willing to call it centuries, so you don't bother exploring much else, for now; the usual trashed and long-abandoned rooms and hallways don't really hold any particular interest of yours, barring any sudden presence of living beings to murder for blood and souls.
Instead you go right ahead give the elevator a closer look. Not finding any noticeable traps or hidden switches, you push the button to call it, finding the door to open immediately; looks like this thing was already here, after all, so wherever it leads this is either the way back out again or it's a secret tunnel of some kind with another entrance.
Either way you get in and continue to pay attention to all the details you see.
Only one of the buttons, labeled 'maintenance' for some reason, has been used much in years, so you press it without delay and find yourself driving downwards in short order, quickly plunging deep underground… Deeper, it feels, than any normal place would have its basement, no matter how much of a maintenance basement it is.
And when the elevator stops moving to open its door again…
Yeah, this really isn't what an asylum should have, no matter what kind of psychology or 'psychology' is being practiced in it. Like, not even the kind of pseudo-science where they just lobotomized people to make them shut up and gibber to themselves in a corner would need these kinds of facilities.
There's a couple of computers near one wall, though you don't waste any time with them, yet; going in deeper to take a look at the window into some kind of wide room, you see a cell, of sorts, with clear windows of its own, within which-
"Ah, a visitor. Please excuse the mess, I wasn't exactly expecting anyone."
A guy in a suit, scraggly beard clearly showing a lack of shaving and large, dark rings around his eyes as if he hasn't been sleeping well for a couple years. On his head there's some kind of weird devices, kind of reminiscent of some kind of Egyptian theme or something.
"Please, don't worry about that," you wave him off, noting the speakers being used to communicate here and turning the microphones on your side on with a quick flip of a switch. "If anything, it's my bad for showing up unannounced."
"You're too kind," the man in the cell smiles a joyless caricature of a facial expression. "Now I don't mean to be impolite, but would you mind looking for a way to release me? This little room of mine has become quite stale over the years, I'm afraid."
Yeah, nah, you aren't in the habit of doing whatever disheveled old men tell you to. Now if he was a chick, maybe you could talk, but as it is… "Why don't we get to know each other jut a tad bit better before any of that? For what it's worth, my own name is Gabriel, Gabriel Livsey. Pleasure to make your acquaintance."
Manners maketh man, ladies and gentlemen.
"Hahaha, pleasure's all mine. Lorenzo Cabot, at your service." He performs a mocking bow. The motion draws your eyes to his unusually fancy hat- a quick overlay with Yoshi and you can derive a lot more information in one go.
Old. Much older than anything else you've seen so far. Material is unusual and possibly reality warping in nature, details unclear. It's bonded to the man wearing it somehow, including several flexible spikes of this stuff going through his ears and the lower back of his head, directly interacting with his brain in some way.
He's acting strangely. Body language, eyes- he's confident, more so than anyone in his position should be. Does the helmet convey some form of power unto him? Some kind of variation of the esper powers you know about already or something else?
"I'll take you on your word," you resume drily. "That's a very fancy hat you have there, by the by. Possibly the oldest object I've seen all year."
"Why, thank you." Lorenzo licks his dry, chapped lips. "It's my pride and joy. Though I fear my family doesn't agree on its merits. I found it on an expedition, once, back when I was an archaeologist."
So he's also positively ancient in addition to everything else. Joy. He almost certainly is from back when things like civilization were still a thing. Speaking of family…
"That might explain the mercenaries guarding this place, if they're still around. Someone must be taking your 'protection' very seriously," you remark.
"Bah! Those ungrateful blood-suckers only care about what they can get out me!" Lorenzo snarls, all pretenses at civility dropped. "Why, we ought to have a family reunion after all these years…"
"Please, go on, don't hold back on my account." This is just getting good.
The imprisoned man growls, doing just that. "I'll be straight with you, stranger, you seem like my kind of folk. Get me out of here and I will… share my blood with you, it's what this is all about. You see, this helmet of mine has given me supernatural powers, but the people closest to me, my family, they feared them, feared me, and stuck me in here. My son especially, the little bastard, he devised all those protections and built this place, including the… The dampeners all around my cell. Disable them and we can work together. The serum they made out of my life-juice is what let them live through everything that happened, for centuries, but I'd rather share it with you than let them rob it from me like I'm in an old people's home and they're living off of the inheritance already!"
Hmm… Ol' Lorenzo here may me a tad bit unstable. Flecks of spittle are certainly flying by the time he finishes his monologue. You definitely do want to take a closer look at that helmet, though…
You give Lorenzo a moment to recover his breath before you give him a demonstrative considering look, the possible consequences of a decision being made here already clear to you, fairly easily at that- no matter how justified his anger may or may not be (you're fairly sure he's not exactly telling you the whole story, here), he seems like the kind of person to not only go and take his revenge, likely ending with the gruesome murder of his family, but also proceed to visit casual cruelty onto anyone else he can get away with.
Just a hunch of yours, but emotional intelligence is how you navigate these situations, after all. You'd be a poor excuse for a man if you didn't go with your gut for no reason at this point, no?
"Yeah, while you do make a compelling point, I can't help but come up with a better offer," you say, taking a step back from the window and measuring the distances involved with your eyes. Should be alright.
"Oh? Pray tell, I'd do a lot to get out of here by this point," Lorenzo grins. The glint in his eyes is getting stronger.
"I'll help you out alright…" You look him right in said eyes, one foot casually stepping in front of you. "Just not alive, that is."
With that you accelerate, utilizing your generally underused super speed move. The world seems to slow down around you as you blur into motion, your speed increasing so far even you can't quite keep ahead of it without planning ahead.
You run right into the wall with the big, wide window, ploughing through both, splinters of glass and torn metal sheets spreading behind yourself like some imitation of an angel's spreading wings.
You do not stop there. You keep going right into the room beyond and through the wall of Lorenzo's room, repeating your performance and slamming into the long-lived sucker with one hand on his shoulder and one through his stomach, steadying his body as you lift it in the air, his face just shifting into a grimace of surprise at this turn of events.
Then you ram him against the other side of his place, the old man's body surprisingly resilient… And you can already feel a slight pressure on the arm sticking inside of him, some form of regeneration at work. Not one to mind the details, you bite into his throat, waiting for his blood to come rushing.
The moment of slowed time (or your own increased speed, really) ends, a wet cough coming from Lorenzo announcing the fact he can keep up with you again. "You could have had… Immortality," he wheezes out past your fangs, despite the red juice already pumping past them.
You'd answer with some pithy remark, but you kind of have your mouth full at the moment.
It takes a bit longer than usual, Lorenzo actually being capable of some form of regeneration, but in the end, there's only so long that can save him. He tastes distinctly weird, too, as his soul kind of indicated some form of outside meddling to your sight for these kinds of things, like some kind of blood-flavored pudding mixed with chunks of beef.
You don't drop his lifeless body once you finish, the smell of an unwashed old man not nearly as revolting it might have been to you if you hadn't had much, much worse before. Time to get this place ransacked, you suppose, before the actual owner shows up or something.
You can take your time to look at Lorenzo's soul and memories, he isn't going anywhere now.
So… Turns out Lorenzo was just a tad bit older than you'd thought, after all. Originally born in 1835, he then just proceeded to live his life and all that jazz, it's not that important. He had a wife and two kids, was a big archaeologist and all, and that's where things get interesting; he went on an expedition to the middle east in the 1890s, finding what he believed to be the 'lost city of Ubar'.
He was all interested in it because it was supposed to predate human civilization itself, something you can actually believe when you look through his memories. The place was largely in ruins, but its architecture strikes you as very much unusual for a place apparently built four millenia before humanity was a thing.
Flat, large buildings buried deep within the sands, made out of some unknown black and smooth materials that don't seem to have degraded in the slightest. It does help that several semi-supernatural events, explainable by being just normal things that happened but damn suspicious when considered in context, seemed to haunt the expedition- irregular, strangely purposefully aimed sand storms, weird sounds in the night, locals going missing, the usual for these kinds of stories.
Lorenzo also found the helmet, lying upon an altar in one of the few buildings they had the time to properly explore. And decided to put it on, like an idiot. Once he discovered the thing gave him telekinetic abilities, he basically had the whole dig site buried again to keep it hidden and recalled the expedition, intent to come back with more people and a better scheme to keep his activities hidden from any potential spies.
He returned to Boston… And was then institutionalized, as he realized he was getting this urge to hurt people, to take them apart and vivisect them alive if he could. Back then he was a tad bit more lucid, even though it seems like that pretty much completely changed eventually. His son in particular was the one to try and find a way to get the helmet off his head without killing him, actually working as the superintendent of the asylum and treating people in the Boston area in general.
And he was telling the truth about the blood thing, too. His family kept itself alive by consuming some kind of refined version of Lorenzo's blood, somehow supernaturally changed to grant them the same longevity as he had thanks to his fancy headwear.
Well, there's a couple samples lying around inside the control room, so you can just take those and-
Oh, looks like you're about to have company. You can hear it at the same time as you 'see' it; the elevator is running, off in the corner, and you can spy two blood signatures coming down into the basement. One of them seems agitated, the other like that of a ghoul, as the common 'circulation issues' they tend to have makes obvious.
You look around at the half-taken apart devices and the mess you've made, Lorenzo's body lying off to the side. Hmm…
"… silent alarm, they didn't have time to let anyone know," you hear from one of them. Might have been on the door, after all? It's not like you really paid attention at that point.
"We just have to hope whoever it was, they did not release Lorenzo," a younger voice replies. Ah, and you have a match; looks like this is Jack Cabot, after all.
His daddy is frothing with rage inside your stomach right now.
"Just remember, stay behind me and-"
You see the pair of Edward Deegan, the ghoul apparently acting as the face for the mercenaries, and Jack emerge from the elevator, freezing in place at the sight before them.
You kick over a cabinet to make it hide Lorenzo's body, well aware they already saw it and the 'ghastly' bite wound, and clear your throat, giving them your usual charming smile. "Well, isn't this awkward?"
"You can say that again," Deegan mutters, rifle at the ready but not yet pointing at you. You suppose you can let him live for a little while longer.
"What… What happened here?" Jack asks, keeping the mild hysteria out of his voice for the most part. "How did-"
"Oh, I just decided to come take a look around," you wave him off, gathering up the suppressive device you took off the wall earlier in one hand and the samples of Lorenzo's blood in the other and putting them aside for a moment.
"What happened to the guards?" The ghoul in the room asks gruffly, likely already assuming but feeling he has to be sure before he moves on. His eyes are trained on you, watching every move like a hawk.
"Oh, they're dead of course. Same as old Lorenzo over here, it looks like the centuries finally caught up to him," you joke, completely unphased by the latent hostility coming off of him ever since he first saw you. "Mind you, he needed a bit help, but everyone does sometimes, right?"
"You… killed him." Jack is standing there, eyes still on where he last saw Lorenzo's corpse. "You killed my father."
"If it helps, he really just wanted to be released at this point," you smile. Something in it must be shining through, as both of the men before you take a step back subconsciously. "I'm not one to judge, I'm really not, but I don't think what you were doing, keeping him in here all by himself for centuries on end, was in his best interest, Jack."
Heh. He seems to be going into shock completely now. Is it really that shocking for a complete stranger to disappear your guards, murder your supernaturally empowered insane father in a strange manner, terrify you and address you by name when he confronts you with your deepest failings and insecurities? Because yes, a look into his eyes was enough to let you know that this exact thing you just told him was one of the things he feared most in life.
"I… I didn't… I was trying to help him!"
"Yeah, great job you were doing then, I suppose," you mock him instinctively, a smug grin telling Jack just how much you think of his 'help'.
… Eh, could it be Taylor is coloring off on you a bit? No offense to her and all, but abjectly terrifying people is more her shtick than yours normally. Then again, it's not like you never do just that…
Ah well, you just gather up your unlawful gains, now also including the samples of weird material built into the walls of Lorenzo's cell and the man's corpse itself, including the helmet still stuck to his brain.
"Well, sorry to say, but your father was quite beyond saving a couple times over by this point. Even if you found some way to get this thing off," you knock on it with two knuckles, "he'd still have been twisted by its influence. There was no real way to get him back or anything."
Aww, he looks like a kicked puppy now. If you had any empathy to speak of, you might even feel bad for him.
"How did you… How did you even know him? Were you an acquaintance, or-"
"Oh no, never saw Lorenzo before coming in here," you interrupt Jack. "That said, I am somewhat of an expert when it comes to potentially supernatural happenings and the like. It was really obvious enough."
"I always thought it was aliens myself," he says, seemingly somewhat detached from everything right now. Well, shock, as you already thought.
"Might be, though I doubt it. The design doesn't match up to any alien stuff I've gotten my hands on, at least."
Deegan gives both of you a look, as if to say 'are you fuckers for real right now'. Well, as a ghoul he may very well have been around back when alien conspiracies were a thing. "Look, I don't know about any of this crap and I don't really want to, either. But if you think you can just walk in here, kill my men and take my employer's stuff, you-"
"Deegan, buddy, please, stop embarrassing yourself." The best part about saying this sentence, every time you do, is that you always actually mean it. It adds a little extra kick, you think. "I don't want to brag or anything, but I own a good third of the wasteland by now. Indirectly, of course, but I trust neither of you two gentlemen is going to blab, hm? What I mean to say is, without disparaging your experience and skills, you really, really don't pose much of a threat to me. I say this not as a warning, but just to let you know."
Your eyes are fixing his as you do so, boring into his soul. Or at least you imagine that's how he'd perceive it.
With him quiet, you turn back to Jack. He seems to have made a remarkably fast recovery after you shook him up just now, already staring at you with his mind awash in wild thoughts racing one another.
"Now, as for you… I did just take your immortality meal ticket, didn't I? My bad about that, but I'm sure you understand."
"It wasn't… I wasn't keeping my father down here to live forever," he protests. "The serum was just a useful result of my research, just a way to ensure I would live until I found a way to cure him."
And he doesn't even seem to be lying to himself when he says that… Much, anyway.
"Ah, but you're not the only one you kept alive with it, are you?" It's always so helpful to go into a conversation when you already know all the levers to pull and the buttons to press. "What about Emogene? Wilhelmina? What will they think, when suddenly they won't be young and spry forever anymore? What about all the knowledge and the skills you possess, and the things you have yet to find out, wasted just like that to the oldest killer of all, time?"
Jack halts, gears grinding to a halt. You do so very much love playing this part.
"Very well, maybe being unaging had its advantages, but that still doesn't mean-"
"I wasn't finished making my offer yet," you point out with a sardonic grin. "Because while Lorenzo may bitten the big one, I do have an alternative for you… And it's even more convenient to boot, without all those repeat applications."
Jack takes a moment to just breathe, having worked himself up into something that never ended up going anywhere, and looks at you as if to ascertain the validity of your claims.
Lorenzo's head tilts where you have him slung over your shoulder, lifeless spine exposed thanks to the wound where you basically ate half his throat. It's almost standing at a right angle now.
"… Tell me more," Jack finally decides.
Deegan grunts. "Are you sure?"
"It doesn't hurt to hear him out, at least," the downright ancient young man sighs. It sounds like an admission of defeat and, for your intents and purposes, it is.
Hook, line and sinker. You grin.
Having sent the dynamic duo off with a bucket of your blood, imbued with the power to thrall others as per your current MO, you go through your mental list of things to do. Well, after delivering the new samples to your laboratories in the restructured vault, using the extra quarantined sample rooms originally meant for anything capable of self-reproduction you want to look into for now.
You really don't want to find out that there's some kind of brain parasites lurking inside of Lorenzo's skull hidden by some eldritch supernatural crap and ready to burst forth and murder people the hard way. This level of caution really is quite justified whenever things like this are concerned, you feel.
Now, running a preliminary analysis of the objects you have seized and consequently kept either Jack or his pet mercenary to really think about so they wouldn't make too much of a fuss with Curie's and Cupcake's help (Isabel excused herself, uncomfortable with you cutting the helmet out of the human brain it was stuck to), you can observe as the spikes retract themselves fully, having already done so partially when he died, presumably, and the thing seems to return to what you shall consider its standby mode for the time being.
Incidentally, Curie suggested that calling it a helmet was somewhat imprecise and suggest you call it a crown instead. You didn't really have any opposing opinions, so it's a crown now. Hurray.
Well, cleaning the blood and brain matter off for a quick bit, you soon have Lorenzo's crown more or less ready for a closer look. You make an effort to describe its looks and construction first before you get into what it's made of, the material a curious cross between stone and metal in terms of molecular composition once you get that analyzed.
How exactly this thing works is still unknown, but you are quite sure it somehow interacts with the wearer's brain, else there'd be little point to the spikes… Unless they're purely meant as a security 'feature', make it impossible to take it off so nobody can steal it unnoticed, perhaps.
There's something about the whole thing, though… It doesn't outwardly react to any stimuli any of you can come up with, but on the flipside it seems to be perfectly inert unless worn by a living being.
By contrast, the 'dampeners' and related materials are actually a lot easier to understand, once you methodically search every bit of knowledge you have on anything even remotely related, making use of your inner world's library and its search functions. Turns out this whole shtick is actually esper-related!
You push down on Yoshi's inflamed protestations. It is 'kind of' esper-related.
While the specifics are, obviously, not anywhere close to the program Academy City is running in that one dimension you've never been to, there are several slight similarities between ways that Jack apparently found to influence Lorenzo's powers and the awakening or activation of esper powers. Not the same things, not even the same category of things, but related ones, at least.
This leads you to the theory that this crown may induce a powerful psychic power of some sort, the same way that scientists there do so with their 'procedure', just unstable and with deleterious effects for the subject's psyche. Just a theory for now, to be clear, but it does have a few good arguments supporting it.
Either way that still doesn't explain how he apparently had several, categorically different powers based on different principles, which is supposed to be impossible for espers, or how his blood apparently could halt aging when injected regularly.
Regardless of blood type, too, you checked on your test subjects.
There seem to exist two variations of the stuff; one, the raw, unfiltered stuff, reversing radiation damage to the body, interestingly, and strengthening it temporarily, making it easier to ignore physical blows and enhancing musculature to a considerable degree. Number two, on the other hand, is a sort of 'filtered' version, thinning it out. Same as the first one it halts aging and reverts any of it back to the first time it has been injected, but otherwise doesn't seem to have any notable effects.
You checked, though you didn't bother wasting too many test subjects on that. Incidentally, the blood of any humans that underwent this treatment takes on a pretty funky aftertaste, like a coating of blood over your blood. It's a little strange, but perfectly edible in your humble opinion.
Congratulations, you have reached rank 10 in a skill!
As you might know, this is a rarity amongst most given populations on a given dimension, seeing as amassing the sheer amount of knowledge and experience required to arrive at this point takes massive amounts of time, effort and resources in most cases- so much so, in fact, that rank 10 is the theoretical limit for a mortal being.
That's right, if you are not supernatural in some way, you are just not going to get over 10. Not only because of the sheer difficulty of doing so, but because at some point, sheer skill is simply not enough; you need some way to elevate it to the next level, leaving any human being or similar to just try and gather more perks at this point.
Which in itself would make them quite the monster in their own right, but we digress. It's statistically near impossible to get to this point in the first place, anyway.
Now that you are at rank 10, you may receive a capstone perk, an especially powerful ability or trick that elevates you above any other practicioners of a given craft or skill. From here on out, you may also gain ever more powerful perks in general, as you have reached the realm only those that transcend the mortal realm may tread upon.
A New Precipice (Capstone): What you have done has not changed. You plan. You design. You innovate. You test. You complete your projects. There is no qualitative difference between where you started and where you are now, safe that you have improved. Considerably so. Imperfections are not even considered where they would have interfered before. Precision is increased where it used to be lacking. Not you have changed, but your results. Grants a significant bonus to all engineering projects and removes penalties for repeatedly working on the same project or design. Such things do not phase you anymore.
Eldritch Technology (Capstone): Advanced technology is often too fragile to withstand the reality warping you emanate, breaking or malfunctioning catastrophically when subjected to it. However, what if your technology was already warping reality itself? Allows you to create eldritch technology that is immune to the techbane effect of magic. You may also effortlessly fuse it with living beings, allow it to warp reality for its purposes and perform feats of technology that may well be magic. Those that use it constantly may find it to be slowly merging with themselves unless it is designed otherwise.
Your large-scale efforts to claim parts of the Commonwealth as your own are really taking off, with several task forces (mostly led by and consisting of your vampires and thralls) active all over the place; after the bit with the Children of Harold, you're in no mood to await the next bunch of upjumped jokesters that think coming anywhere near your private space is a good idea.
What? Not your fault nobody literally wrote their name on the Commonwealth, but you're in it so it's yours now. Simple as that.
Case in point, you can see a small throng of your robots off in the distance as you drift along the coast in the form of a bank of mist. It's only a couple hundred of them, as Isabel prefers to travel lightly instead of being protected by the recommended (by yourself) one thousand combat-oriented robots at all times.
She seems to be making progress at any rate. Right now she's just on settlement duty, of course, but you always worry about your lovers, you can't help it. Even if a couple of pipe guns are a joke against a normal living being, not to even mentioned your enhanced thralls.
Significantly enhanced. Aura alone ensures they're all a league or two above the average wasteland settler.
But anyway, that's not why you're hanging around. The reason for your presence lies a little further out, a military outpost constructed further along the slender stretch of solid ground you've been following for a little bit now.
Fort Strong awaits, surrounded by the sea on all sides except for a single street leading up to it, and it was supposed to be a weapons research and testing facility before the United States functionally ceased existing in this dimension.
And you've come to clean it out. Hopefully there'll be something juicy to be found.
The place is a shithole, of course, like any other place you haven't gone and fixed up, in person or otherwise. That said, this particular orifice filled with fecal matter is also playing host to, as it seems like, quite a few supermutants, the green 'giants' patrolling the outsides and several more of them currently inside the still somewhat intact main facility.
You do not feel particularly troubled by this, nor the chunks of bloody corpse matter you can sense in there with them by the splattered blood balled into place and coating a good part of the ground and walls in some spots. If anything, they're really making it even easier for you to do whatever you damn well want, not that the brutes have any way to meaningfully impede you anyway.
So you walk straight inside. The mutants outside notice you, of course, and open fire without a second thought, but a quick application of hemokinesis to permanently blind them, your telekinesis plasmid to draw them closer to yourself one by one and your teeth finding their naked skin and bulging muscles to be little issue either are more than enough to summarily murder them all one by one, throwing the lot's souls in with the rest of their kind you've already deigned to gather up.
Interestingly, they share a section of your soul menagerie with your ghouls, inhabiting the same ruined buildings and all. They seem to just kill each other over and over again completely senselessly, but hey, it's not like you particularly care and they seem to recover pretty much instantly after every battle anyway, so no skin off your back.
Your casual stroll proceeds into the most intact building around, noting that this location is, indeed, appropriate for a naval base or something should you choose to implement one. Sure, any serious construction would likely be opposed by nearby sea mirelurks and there's really not many places a ship could sail to as of yet, not to mention the very many, very serious dangers awaiting anyone doing so in the open ocean, but that can be a problem for another day.
For now you're pacifying this region, which mean massacring any hostiles to human life in general. Supermutants like these here very much do count.
The insides of Fort Strong are about what you were expecting, in all honestly; trash, debris and those characteristic 'flesh-sacks' the FEV-inundated mutants tend to make out of whatever they kill are lying around, there's some heavily armed presence of the ugly baldies to be found and it's all a great old hoot. However, once you're done massacring them by abusing your superior speed and strength (and using them as throwing weapons against each other a you keep on eating them), you get to exploring the place a bit more.
Turns out this very site was where the US Army developed and tested several… interesting military hardware systems, to put it like that. There's not much of said research left, of course, but you find notes on the T51-b variant of power armor, some samples of which you have lying around back home, incidentally, and a weapon apparently named 'Fatman'.
Which, as it happens, is the delivery mechanism for mini-nukes. Which were also at least partially designed in here.
And they have a lot of ordinance lying around in the basement as a result. A lot lot. Heck, if all of these explosives stored underneath the building were to go off at once, you would definitely be pretty badly hurt, maybe even killed by the resulting explosion.
Not many things can do that these days. Then again, not many things are essentially a couple nukes in raw materials.
Yeah, you're having all of this stuff stored elsewhere. In separate storerooms, that is, and kept well away from any possible ways to actually blow it up. Then again, you also have a very considerable amount of mini-nuke parts, enough to put together a couple hundred, you reckon, assuming time hasn't completely ruined them.
The next station on your usual touring of the Commonwealth is in Boston again, for once; you've been taking your time about really cutting into the enormous pie that is the old city.
It's not that you don't want to just eat a massive trail of destruction through the somewhat more densely occupied area, of course, more just you want to have a plan when you do it. Or at least an actual target or something. You don't exactly plan to cocoon this jump, after all, so senseless eating would be kind of a waste and an issue on that accord.
Anyway, Cambridge is the particular neighbourhood you're interested in today. Specifically, Cambridge Polymer Labs, a research facility that was supposed to have some kind of government contract back in the day according to what little newspaper ads you, or rather some of your people, found on the topic.
There's a reason you have a bunch of guys working their way through the Boston Public Library. This particular company had recruitment ads posted in the Boston Bugle at some point, hence your attention to it this time around.
Coming inside, you're greeted by the same old devastation that got just about everything in this dimension, or at least everything you've seen in it so far.
Well, at least there won't be anyone to bother you on the way in, right?
Well, wrong, technically. A Miss Nanny robot accosts you as you make your way inside, but a quick snap of your arm disables it quite handily. It didn't seem to have any real personality and your soul vision didn't show anything of the sort either, so it's not like it was particularly interesting or unique.
Now, down in the labs of this place… You find two things relatively quickly. One, the scientists that worked here have apparently all turned into ghouls, a mild issue you make short work of as per usual. Two, they were actually working on something for the military indeed, but apparently didn't get it done in time before the bomb fell.
Project deadlines, man. The one thing university does prepare you for, though you usually just ended up sleeping with a professor or two to buy yourself some breathing room, personally.
Now the question is, what exactly were these guys even trying to do… And is it something you can use?
You have to say, of the many things you could be suffering from, insufficient labeling seems like the least of your worries, but it took you using your supernatural Yoshi powers to go and get the various samples and materials strewn all over the place together as you puzzled your way through half-finished equations and a damaged terminal with half its entries missing or corrupted to finally make some headway with this stuff.
Would it have killed them to actually leave some clear notation behind? You swear, some people… Laboratory etiquette is a thing that exists, okay? And part of that is not making it impossible for anyone that has to read your work for whatever reason to understand what you were even trying to achieve.
Anyway, using every bit of lithium and gold you can find and throwing them into a machine that really shouldn't need to be as big nor as complicated as it is to do what it does, you successfully manage to do what the employees of this company failed to do in life; synthesizing an interesting compound that, combined with the rest of their stuff, can take radiation and convert it into electrical energy.
It's somewhat inefficient, but you suppose it does help in some ways… Oh, and you totally can make use of these piezonucleic concepts in some of your inventions and technologies.
In theory, all you need is radiation and something that you want to charge. And really… One particular use case does stick out to you right now.
The Sisterhood of the Woods was graced by the Lord's guardian once again, as new and much better 'self-defense appliances' had become available to it. A sleek, elegant thing, completely unlike the bulky seed-guns used by the Children of Harold (they had narrowed it down to the old cult being either blasphemous due to it leadership misleading them all or else simply mistaken in the true nature of their Lord), the thick plant stalks could be used to dispense electric shocks at range by pressing a button of sorts on them.
They even had two different modes, one to incapacitate humans and one to hurt them. Truly their lord was generous, His bounty ever-giving and His seed flowing unending to bless the land and the Sisterhood.
Hurray for material sciences, you guess.
Of course every bit of useful technology is enough to whet your appetite for more, every time you do find any. Unfortunately, it isn't exactly as easy as just going out and stumbling over it, no matter how amusing the thought of doing so is.
Hey, look, there's some FEV on the side of the street! Uh-oh…
But yes, luckily for you, you do have your ways, when there isn't any convenient clues for you to follow up on. Hence you're taking some time out of your busy schedule to cast one of your perhaps objectively most powerful spells- that don't relate to murdering things directly, anyway.
Time to give Cosmic Guidance another spin.
"Where can I find nearby useful technology that I have neither found nor already obtained?"
You close your eyes, ready to receive the knowledge you ordered. If you were some human moron with no idea how anything works, maybe you'd describe it as the 'wisdom of the stars' or some such crap, but thankfully you actually do have a general idea how what you're doing actually works so you can spare yourself the embarrassment.
The answer to your question appears in your mind, with a clarity and directness that reflects your increased mastery over this type of magic gained through, well, lots of practice that may or may not have involved predicting the likelihoods of your wives loving you (hint, the answer is yes).
'HalluciGen Inc., a short way to the east, is filled with chemical weaponry meant to manipulate minds. Go soon and you will find test subjects already present.'
Cheery, that. You'll add it to your list.
