Piper wrinkled her nose at her post-bath smell. Not that it was bad, no, but she just wasn't used to her funk being gone. Diamond City didn't have any dedicated bathing facilities, so the easiest way to bathe was to make your way to the river and do a quick full-body dip while wearing your clothes. Preferably with someone standing guard, in case a mirelurk tried to interrupt you during the few moments you were submerged. Nora had apologized for the lack of soap and a towel; the lack of soap didn't bother Piper, as she'd so seldom had a chance to use it in the first place, while she had no idea what a towel even was. She dried herself off with some old rags Nora had left her with, then put on a spare set of clean clothes Nora had loaned her while her regular duds were drying after she'd agitated them by hand in her bathwater.
She walked to the front door of the house and leaned against the doorframe, looking out and watching the quiet babble of activity in the settlement. The house directly across from the one she was in was a collapsed ruin (and didn't that just further inflame Piper's phobia for prewar construction collapsing on or under her). A settler with a hacksaw was going after the larger pieces of debris sticking out, cutting them into manageable chunks for later determination of if it was salvage-worthy or should just be completely junked. Nora and Sturges were next door (on the left, from Piper's perspective) having an animated discussion of some kind. Really, there seemed to be activity of some sort going on at every house in the settlement… every house but one, that was. The one directly next door to the one Piper had bathed in.
"Curiosity killed the cat," Piper muttered to herself, cutting straight across the yard to the house in question. The mailbox had "JONES" printed on the sign, and that went a long way to answering some of her questions. Inside, well, Piper had been in plenty of pre-war houses, and there was nothing overly remarkable about this one. Old, broken furniture… ancient appliances that would never run again… dusty old belongings that would be better served being scrapped and repurposed to help out the settlement. Except that Piper got the idea that this place was meant to be a memorial, to function as the grave for the husband Nora never had a chance to bury. (Piper saw an old issue of Grognak on the kitchen counter and was a little tempted to borrow it for… research purposes, but if she wanted to be ghoulish, she'd just go hang out in the Glowing Sea). When she walked deeper into the house and saw the crib, still intact, she amended her opinion: it wasn't just a grave, it was a promise that Nora had made to herself, that she would indeed find her son someday and make this old house a home once more.
"I'm responsible for the Great War, you know," Nora said from behind her.
Piper turned around and gave her a skeptical look. "Oh yeah? Funny, you don't look Chinese," she said.
Nora walked past her and stood over Shaun's crib. Suspended over it was a rickety old mobile with three arms, a miniature model rocket hanging down from one arm (the other two having vanished somewhere in the intervening centuries). "I was standing right here," Nora said. "I reached out and started the mobile spinning, and then Codsworth called me into the living room, where the news anchor was talking about how cities were being incinerated left and right." She turned and met Piper's eye with a dead serious expression on her face. "If I'd never spun that mobile, never got those rockets going, then the Great War never would have happened."
Piper chuckled nervously. "Yeah, good one, Blue. A bit too morbid for my tastes, but cute nonetheless."
Nora grinned, but her heart wasn't really in it. She turned back to the crib. "I'll get it all fixed up, you know," she murmured. "Once I get Shaun back, I'll put the house back in order — as much as I can, anyway — and we'll live… well, as happily ever after as we can."
Piper walked up behind her and squeezed one shoulder in sympathy. "You'll get him back, Nora," she whispered. "You're gutsy as hell, and I wouldn't bet so much as a dented cap on anyone who gets in your way."
Nora turned abruptly and squeezed Piper in a tight hug, burying her face in the other woman's shoulder. Her body kept heaving, and only the growing sensation of warmth and wetness on her shoulder really clued Piper in that Nora was quietly sobbing. Piper wrapped her arms around Nora and returned the squeeze, and they stayed like that until Nora had long since run dry.
After she'd composed herself, Nora forced a bright smile and pointed out the door. "Oh, come on! I wanted to show you something!" She actually did sound a little perkier. Piper allowed herself to be led out and across the road to the settlement's workshop, where Sturges was already at work on some copper piping. "Do you remember the water purifier in Diamond City?" she asked.
"Yeah…" Piper said. Of course she did, it was responsible for water for the entire city.
"Check THIS out." Nora opened up her Pip Boy and flipped through a few different images, each a rough technical sketch. "When that little shit sent me into the water, I took the opportunity to swim around and scope out his big water purifier. After I got out of the water, I sketched out its design, and now I'm having Sturges build a prototype duplicate."
"A prototype?" Piper asked, confused. Why would she need more than one?
Nora grabbed Piper's hand, full of enthusiasm, and dragged her around the house and beyond. "Look!" she said, waving her hand in front of her. "What do you see?"
"Uh… Concord River?" Piper said.
"MONEY!" Nora shouted. "Thousands upon thousands of gallons of free money!" She held out a container of purified water. "This bad boy goes for, what, twenty caps? A purifier the same caliber as the one in Diamond City puts out about forty units of water per day, Sturges thinks." Nora again spread her hand over the river. "How many purifiers do you think I can fit into the river? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? More?" Nora cackled. "Even if I can make north of a thousand units of water a day, do you really think I'll put much of a dent in the generally accepted price of water?" Nora shook her head. "People will always, always need it for drinking, and cooking, and cleaning, and watering crops, and God knows what else. Even if it goes down to a cap per unit, I'll still make almost as much in a single day as I did from my once-off, completely-by-chance discovery of three gold bars, which will probably never happen again."
Piper started getting a little nervous from Nora's big long 'I want to be a water baron' speech. "Uh, hey Blue, what do you intend to use all this money on?" she asked.
Nora looked at Piper like it was the stupidest question ever. "Making the Commonwealth better for everyone, of course. What, are you worried I want to take over the Commonwealth or something?" She gave Piper a wry grin. "Well, Shaun is my priority, first and foremost. But if I can improve life not just for him, but for everyone… then civilization in these parts will grow more stable. If everyone has access to food and water… maybe power…" Nora trailed off, awash in the potential for what the future of Boston held, if she only had the determination to make it happen herself.
Her answer did let Piper relax, though. If she'd said something insane like "global domination", she would have been tempted to pop Nora with her pistol then and there, no matter how much she liked the woman.
After a few minutes, Nora realized she'd abandoned Piper to frolic in her own future plans. "Oh, sorry about that. I went woolgathering."
Piper frowned. "What's wool?"
Nora frowned. "What do you count when you're trying to fall asleep?"
"Distant gunshots," Piper said. "And I'm not counting them so much as I hope they stay distant."
Nora grimaced. "And with that, my head is once more firmly out of the clouds." She started walking back to the workshop. "Come on," she gestured. "Let's start getting ready for Tenpines."
Piper followed her, but as she did she glanced off to the right. There was the foundation of yet another house, but this one had already been cleared of all debris and the skeletal frame of a new building was rising above it. Within the skeleton was a odd-looking egg-shaped device, large enough to fit a person. "Hey, what's that?" she asked, gesturing towards it.
Nora looked to where Piper was pointing and frowned. "Uh… it's hard to explain," Nora said lamely. "And it's, uh, not quite ready for prime time. I'll show that to you later… if I can get it working."
Piper nodded, wondering what secrets Nora was keeping now. She'd never once hesitated to share anything at all that was on her mind; why the reticence now?
XXXXXXXXXX
The Sole Survivor really is responsible for the Great War, you know. If you just stand there staring at Shaun in his crib indefinitely, the world will keep on trucking none the worse for wear. Only by spinning that rocket mobile does Codsworth get prompted to call for you and let you know it's all coming to an end.
Being a water baron is a popular method towards becoming wealthy in Fallout 4, although the game by default only lets you store a few hundred units of water in your settlement before it stops making any more and you have to empty it out to go sell before it'll start making it anew. (Naturally, I modded that crap right out of there). It is quite a bother to get it properly set up, filling up the entire river with purifiers and getting enough electricity generated to run them all (not to mention the perk requirements some of the constructions have), so it'll be quite some time before Nora can get her ambitions up and running.
The "egg-shaped device" is… well, I'm not gonna spoil it, haha. Things are gonna start getting wild when Nora is finished with that, I can tell you.