Begin Recording

It Was Boring

Recording by Scribe Ellison

Brother and sister scribes, I'm sure you're waiting for the climax of this story as much as I am—but the General's been called away to help detective Valentine with a case. So I will record several days of tapes while we all wait impatiently for her to come back.

At least we know the story has a happy ending because Shaun is here in Sanctuary. Today he's making a book. The kid is always fiddling with something. He looks like his mother, ragged black hair and bright eyes.

"Are you making a tape? Can I talk on it?"

"Sure, what do you want to tell the rest of the scribes?"

"Hellooooo Arlington Library! This is Shaun Mason. I'm sewing a book. Did any of you ever make one from scratch?"

"Mostly we use holotapes, but I think my teacher Scribe Yearling made a book once to see how they did it before the war. Are you going to write the words too?"

Shaun looks down to make a stitch. "No, it's for my brother Jimmy. He wants to write the New Adventures of Grognak and it's better if it's in a real book. And books are nice."

Now that I can agree on! "Want to be a field scribe when you grow up?"

The boy grins. "Maybe! Shiloh wants to be a paladin and jump out of vertibirds but I'd rather fix things. How did you get to be a field scribe?"

So I waste a little holotape space with my story, since Shaun keeps asking. "I had so many siblings we didn't fit in our apartment in Rivet City, so Papa delivered me to Scribe Yearling so the Brotherhood would give me a place to live. I just wanted to find prewar books and read them but I had to be an initiate first and run miles and do a thousand push-ups and learn to wear power armor."

Shaun asks, "Did you hurt yourself? Mom won't let me try hers on because she's afraid I'll hurt myself."

"Well the first thing the teacher said was..." and I try to mimic the deep voice of the huge paladin who taught us initiates, "'Power armor is stronger than the tendons in your shoulders and the joints in your knees, that's why we do exercises so the doc-bot doesn't have to push your parts back into place!'"

"Yeah, Mom does exercises in her power armor, Paladin Danse taught her. He's really nice. Mom says the rest of the Brotherhood isn't as nice."

This is clearly a question. "Well… I always heard Paladin Danse got where he is by being a decent person, but the rest of us have a whole history. Elder Maxson follows the original purpose of the Brotherhood, to make sure nobody ever gets their hands on the kind of technology that caused the Great War. That's why he came to fight the Institute, to destroy their dangerous technology. And take out anyone that got in his way.

"But about fifteen years ago we had another elder, Elder Lyons, and he wanted to use technology to help get clean water for everyone in the Capital. He got a lot of people killed doing that, but the other scribes at Arlington Library and some of the other members thought his ideas were good. Elder Maxson did not invite us to go along on the Prydwen so we're still living in the Capital Wasteland, trying to pull all the people together like your mom is doing up here."

I didn't tell the boy that the Brotherhood is in danger of fracturing again and that if his sister wants to wear the best power armor she'll have to pick the winning side, whichever one that is. We talked some more about the Citadel and the Arlington Library and Brotherhood operations in the Capital before I asked, "So we're all waiting to hear what your mom found in the Institute, but you were already there weren't you? Want to tell everyone what it was like?"

"The Institute is like..." The boy holds a piece of blank paper in front of his face and intones in his best doomful voice, "Like this. White. And boring."

I laugh. "How can it be boring? Don't they have amazing technology?"

"I guess, but you can't do anything with it. Nobody does anything, it's just school and tests all day. Alice and Julia and Quentin just wanted to be scientists so all they wanted to do was school. Shiloh is a pain in the neck but at least she wants to do things."

"What happened when your mom first came to the Institute?"

A shrug. "She made a lot of trouble but nobody told me about it. Nobody told me she was my mom for a long time either, so I was scared of her at first but she was always nice to me."

He doesn't know what I'm really curious about, or else he knows it so well he doesn't think I'd be interested. So my attempts to learn the story are a failure.