Begin Recording
First Steps
Recording by Scribe Ellison
"Sure you don't want me to skip ahead to reaching Diamond City? I can't imagine your roads are much different from ours. Your roads have giant ants on them? Scribe, you should be making recordings! All right,
"Carla's route took us to the closest settlement, the Abernathy farm where we met Connie and Blake, and Dogmeat made friends with their cat. The Abernathys had just lost their daughter Mary to a raider attack and asked Carla to pass on the word to the Minutemen if she came across any. Carla said she didn't think anyone should be counting on the Minutemen these days. At least she didn't say the Minutemen were down to one survivor. The Abernathys traded tatos and melons to Carla for ammo, and were happy to hear of the new settlement nearby.
The road took us past Drumlin Diner where we found a pair of lowlifes threatening Trudy, who'd taken over the place as a trading post. Her son had gotten a jet habit thanks to these two—first taste's free, just like all that Just Say No stuff we got in school. Carla said we shouldn't get involved but I think our presence as strangers kept the two sides from getting violent. Trudy paid them off and told them to take their chems elsewhere in the future. Her poor son looked sick as hell with withdrawals and said he was never doing jet again.
"My only experience with chems was a housemate when we were in law school who got a mentats habit. Oh god, you don't know what law school is do you? Lawyers… if a brahmin gets out and tramples someone's garden, should the brahmin's owner pay for the crops, or the person who built the fence or the kid who's supposed to be watching the brahmin and didn't notice it was going into season and likely to wander? A lawyer's job is to figure out a fair answer so people don't have to shoot each other. So we have to learn all the laws and all the decisions other lawyers made last time. So we have to study a lot. Anyway, watching my roommate Kate stumble around when her dose wore off was enough to put me off chems.
"So that was our first encounter. Mostly Carla and I just walked along on either side of the brahmin. Dogmeat had a good nose for trouble and he could warn us of anything we didn't see first. Compared to work in Sanctuary, just walking was easy. And—peaceful. As long as nothing is attacking you, it's very peaceful. No sound but our footsteps, and the light on the dead trees… sorry, Scribe, my mind's wandering.
"The walk to Diamond City should have taken four days, it took us ten. Entering Lexington we heard lots of shooting up ahead and Carla said we should wait, search for salvage while we waited until the raiders moved on. And she had a suggestion for me: we were right by the Corvega plant where the raiders were holed up, so why didn't I go in and kill them and then we'd have justice and hundreds of caps worth of salvage. Carla wasn't a fighter so it would have to be me.
"I told Carla what lawyers do and that the only reason I can shoot a gun is because Nate made a bet that he could teach me. But she made her case, a long list of things these raiders had done. And Carla knew of a tunnel into the basement of the factory.
"Since the raiders' war didn't seem to be moving on I eventually gave in and crept through the tunnel to the factory in the middle of the night.
"In the end I wiped out the raider gang. I watched them first, got a good look at what raiders do at home. They were dirty, they fought each other for bits of food or gambled with bullets. A lot of them were chem users, just staring into space zoned out on med-x or taking psycho and slamming each other around. I hadn't really believed what Preston and Marci told me about raiders—how could a group of people live without trying to make their lives better? Anyone would want clean clothes and a real bed and a toilet, wouldn't they? Apparently not if you have enough chems and violence. I shot the first guy because he was boasting about what he'd done to a woman. That was what it took to make me look down my rifle scope at a human being. That was the first killing I remember in the kind of horrible detail you're supposed to remember things like that.
"But then I found proof that this was the group that had chased Preston and the others up from Quincey, and killed the Longs' son, and I found the locket the raiders took from Connie Abernathy. So I got my lesson in… wasteland justice, maybe. Learned that killing could be the right thing to do. When I brought the locket to Connie she cried and declared their family would ally with the Minutemen. When I told the Longs their son's killers had been wiped out Jun smiled and stood straight for the first time since we met, and Marci thanked me by name—once, then she went back to calling me rude names until she finally switched to General when everyone else did.
"And Carla thought it was great. I was hauling out piles of raider weapons and salvage from the factory and all Carla had to do was make room on her pack brahmin. We made so many caps off that haul, I spent it on shipments of circuitry and gears so Sturges could make more turrets for us.
"That's all to the road story, we crossed the bridge into Boston and that should probably go on your Diamond City record."