I was so tempted to save Lyons Pride in this story. This is the optimistic Fallout story where everybody gets the good ending after all… but I couldn't quite justify just declaring them alive because I wanted to.

Begin Recording

Making Friends

Recording by Scribe Ellison

And then things started happening. But I probably should tell you more about the Brotherhood in the Commonwealth. I've gotten out of order, I visited the Prydwen well before I made it to the Institute. But sooner or later I have to talk about Maxson. Your leader. Who I don't get along with.

I had spent time with Recon Squad Gladius off and on, gotten to be good friends with Haylin and spent way too much time arguing Brotherhood philosophy with Danse. And of course I was hoping for an invitation to visit the airship because it was the most amazing thing I'd seen so far in this new world and I wanted it.

What? Of course I want the Prydwen. I'm not going to try to take it or anything, but I want it; it's wasted as a terror weapon. What would your Elder Lyons have done with a mobile fortress, probably mapped the entire east coast. Supply drops to recruit isolated settlements. Safe transport of refugees. Putting the fear of god into groups like the Gunners.

While waiting for the invitation, our adventure at ArcJet systems had left Danse's power armor totally fried. The operating system had survived but all the joints were locked up and every rubber seal had softened and reformed out of shape.

I did offer, "Come to Sanctuary, we've got Sturges and all his fabrication equipment." but Haylin wanted to stay at the police station to track the signals that turned out to be the molecular relay in operation. But Sturges was happy to make a set of rubber seals for T-60 power armor I was happy to deliver them in between all the other things I was doing. Then we'd sit around on the roof of the police station and work on the power armor and talk.

That's how I learned about what happened in the capital while I was still frozen—in a very different way than you describe it, Scribe! How Elder Lyons let the Brotherhood split and nearly led everyone to ruin trying to help mad scientists and ungrateful wastelanders. Even so, no one ever called Sara Lyons anything but 'the best of all of us.' I suppose since she's gone and can't have inconvenient opinions now.

I also learned a lot about the Brotherhood's beliefs, controlling technology and keeping it out of the hands of people who would misuse it. Honor and respect and the chain of command. The soldier thing was familiar because I knew soldiers, but my new friends seemed to have their hearts in it in a way that Nate's buddies never did. The 108th believed in keeping the red Chinese off American soil but they also had families and interests, hell, Nate had a comic book collection. The Brotherhood had the Brotherhood. The way they looked after each other though, that impressed me. I heard what had happened to the other members of Gladius, and how Danse and Rhys had risked everything trying to save them.

I had hope for some kind of alliance. I had a couple of proposals about trading protection for crops ready to offer to the right person when we visited the airship, but I was hoping for more. The Minutemen and the Brotherhood have enough in common that I was hoping we could work together. But to my great annoyance, Danse didn't have much respect for the Minutemen. He wasn't wrong, then, the Minutemen were thirty people in five settlements with homemade laser muskets but we were growing fast, and… ok, I just wished people I respected would respect my project, it made me feel like I was back in college trying to get teachers to respect my decision to apply to law school.

So I agreed to join up, hoping that once I had a Brotherhood title I could get to a place where I could talk about that alliance. And I was hoping I could graduate to being called Mason instead of Civilian, but the guys just switched to Soldier while Haylin started calling me Em.

Oh, and at some point I teased Haylin about the whole last-names-only thing and she said, "Well my first name is Bambi. 'Scribe Haylin' is an improvement." and I laughed some and asked if Bambi is even a real name. I suppose it is, some version of 'bambina' maybe, but nobody ever calls her anything but Haylin.

And of course I asked about the airship. I remembered a fuzzy conversation, Nick and Piper talking about how the airship had to be a weapon of war and who here was worth having a war with.

"We call our ship the Prydwen. I watched her built, saw her maiden voyage from Adams Air Force Base. She's loaded with enough troops and supplies to mount a major offensive. And if she's here that means Elder Maxson's here. And that means we're going to war."

Not what I wanted to hear. "Tell me about Elder Maxson, I know he's your leader...'

"Our commander, the commander of the east coast division of the Brotherhood of Steel. he's the model of what every Brotherhood soldier hopes to become. If we're going to war, I can promise you that he'll be leading the charge."

Their faces were so full of pride, even Haylin was smiling. I wanted to say that this scared me, that I was thinking of everyone I knew in the Commonwealth who could be hurt in a war. We didn't even know what weapons the Institute had to fight back. I couldn't think of a way to say that that wouldn't sound wrong to my friends.