What shall you and Nora do now? The two of you have several things you could follow up on. You could go to Sanctuary to help out Preston and his motley crew, follow Mama Murphy's vague instructions and try to make your way towards Diamond City (after thorough preparations for the journey, anyway) or you could just dick around and get used to the post-apocalypse a little more. And, of course, plunder anything not nailed down here in Concord you may still get a use out of.
After a quick talk with Nora, you summon one of the raider souls you just ate so as to make him help carry stuff. Soul number 21 is strong enough to carry some shit and you also do like the irony.
Rounding up all the corpses your rampage produced, you pile up the weapons and ammo to one side of your corpse pile, together with any electronics you can find throughout the building. It's not much, but it's something.
You figure stuff that can't really be produced anymore would be valuable, and maybe you can figure out how to fix some of this stuff.
Making an impromptu bag out of the little clothes the raiders wore, you stuff all your loot inside (after unloading the guns, as Nora insists) and make your summoned soul carry it around with you.
On the way back to Sanctuary, the two of you (plus baggage carrier) take a short breat at a 'Red Rocket' gas station, where Nora befriends a dog that soon follows your group. It eyes you warily for a bit, but seems to decide it tolerates you, after all.
It's not long afterwards that you arrive back in the suburbs you came from. The group of settlers seem to have started putting their meagre belongings into one of the houses you'd cleaned out previously.
When you speak to Sturges and ask about any help they need, he mentions "If you want to help out, there's lots of stuff you could do to help... We need beds, reliable water and food, protection, all the usual stuff. I can show you how to make some of it, there were a few blueprints left inside the worbenches' drawers."
You and Nora spend a few minutes going over the blueprints relevant to your situation.
"So, the beds look easy enough. We just need some wood, cloth and nails. May not be the most comfortable lay, but it'll work," you say, earning a nod from Nora.
Pulling the blueprints for a basic water purifier and a small generator over, she continues your line of thought: "This basic water purifier and the small generator to run it may be more of a challenge. We'll need some materials for this, but actually putting them together will be the hardest part."
You agree and remark you may as well take some of the miscellaneous stuff the two of you found in the luggage of the people that died in the vault for this project.
"Finally, these autonomous machine gun thingies will need one of our weapons and some programming, but according to these notes, it should be pretty simple," and you're SO stealing the design for these things. Automatic friend/foe detection combined with a gun? Yes please.
Taking a moment to look at the sky, you estimate you have enough time to do one thing only before you'll have to hide from the sun... or you could do so right now and tackle this whole issue tomorrow night. You DO have that open gut wound, after all.
Thinking for a moment, you breathe out your newest meal, soul number 23. You'd figured any kind of leader of raiders would have an idea of how they would attack, and therefore where to place turrets to shoot them when they do.
Though on that topic, you should take the time to interrogate him later to find out where to find more food.
Sending him off, you tell Nora you'd prefer to get started on the turrets for now. Protection seems like the most urgent issue to be tackled, and it's also the one thing you profit the most from. So the two of you start to take apart any electronics you have on hand after gathering anything useful out of the pile of stuff from the houses you'd cleaned out earlier and your loot from the museum.
This part is not particularly hard, just time consuming. The harder parts will be assembling everything you need to put together the interior of your first project and welding a few metal plates together for the exterior, then assembling the whole thing without breaking it.
The end result of your work is... well, pretty nice. It looks well put together and won't shoot at anyone that's not hostile (no idea exactly how that works, but it does). Sharing a happy smile with a sweaty Nora (welding produces lots of heat, news at 11), you go and find your soul minion to have him explain where to put it best.
"Well, boss," he begins, "the first place you gotta secure is the bridge across the river. Easiest way to get into the place and all."
Nodding, you breathe him in and go to tell Nora the news and deploy your turret together. It doesn't take long until the two of you carry it towards the bridge, where you securely place it and turn it on. It begins to slowly rotate in place, scanning the area for hostiles.
You've done good work.
Next off, the sun's coming up, so you return to the root cellar you'd previously taken refuge in, a somewhat shy Nora coming with you to take a rest.
Taking a moment to look into yourself, you find that time seems to be going somewhat faster inside yourself. Just a slight increase, but still. The tree seems to have grown a single fruit, so you enter yourself and teleport to it via maid. Maidport? Telemaid? Whatever.
Once you're done, you breathe your consciousness out again and settle down next to Nora, sleeping in an effort to recover your health.
Waking up after a while, you discover that the gaping hole in your stomach has healed up, only leaving a somewhat rough patch of reddened skin. Stretching a bit (not that it makes any difference, but habits die hard), you consider what to do next... and on closer thought, you want to see if your magic has anything to help against things like that deathclaw intent on murdering you, so you go to grab the rat you'd stashed under some weights after you nearly killed it yesterday and resume training.
After quite a bit of practice and fiddling around, you figure out the chant and effect you'd been ruminating on for a while now.
Feel the bite of winter in your bones!
The rat, meanwhile, actually died of the constant cold you'd been subjecting it to. Not too surprising, but at least you gave its death meaning.
Throwing the corpse in a corner, you think about what to do next for a bit as Nora suddenly wakes up.
"Hey sleepyhead, you doing alright?" you smile at her, making her yawn exaggeratedly and exclaim "Better than I thought I'd be doing. I think shooting all those people helped."
"Mhm. Actually, you want me to summon that vet again so you can work on your aim a bit?"
"Sure, just give me a moment to wake up," she says as she cuddles into your waist, what with you sitting on the mattress. Surprisingly cute.
After sending Nora off, you get back to fiddling around with your magic, this time with the spell you use all the time; trying to find a way to shorten the chant.
It's slow progress, but you're getting there.
It is around this time that you feel that small pang of hunger signaling the sun just went down. Looks like you can go up again.
Emerging from your chamber of doom root cellar, you return to the workbench and breathe that vet soul back in, signaling Nora that it's time to get back to work. It isn't long until the two of you are both present, pouring over the design for that water purifier and checking whether you have all the materials you need to make it.
You do, though it's a close thing. You're running out of metal to use, this thing's pretty bulky and sheet metal doesn't grow on trees, especially kinds that you can use near water you want to be potable.
It's a lot of work, and far more welding than when you built the turret, but eventually, the two of you have everything that goes into the water purifier, though you don't set it up yet. No point without a generator to drive it.
Speaking of which, you took a look at what you need and what you have stored inside the workshop house. It's... not looking good. You don't think you have enough wire, aluminum or even just metal in general left.
You'll need to source some electronics from somewhere, mainly, though you won't mind miscellaneous materials of any kinds, either.
In the meantime, your very first meal ever has been doing good work, taking lots of wood and cloth to the the settlers to have them help in making their beds. At the end of the day, it seems their part of the project has progressed rather nicely, despite their obvious incompetence in all matters.
Seriously, you could bet that karen didn't touch a single bedframe the whole time. You weren't there, but you can envision it perfectly.
Regardless, at the end, they've gotten three beds done, leaving only two left for all of them.
Taking a short break, you tell Marco that you'll breathe him out again later to finish with the beds, before unsummoning him and instead calling out the souls that had that specific, strangely good aftertaste when you ate them, trying to see if they share any similarities with the one that apparently has powers.
For some reason. Your powers are insane at the best of times.
First, slave-soul number 15. One of those random Merchant thugs you ate. As soon as he finishes materializing, you note a strange smell in the air, followed by Nora staggering briefly as you hurriedly unsummon him.
Asking her if she's alright, she says: "I just felt really sick all of a sudden. It went away as soon as he did, but please don't use him with me around in the future. It's just... unpleasant."
Nodding and mentally noting that this one seems to have some kind of weakening field, you proceed to call upon soul number 22, that raider you ate yesterday night. Breathing him out, you seem him creating several scalpels out of thin air. Seems he can create medical equipment or something? Including chemicals and medicines, judging by what comes next. Dismissing him, his creations do not persist when he doesn't.
Too bad, that would have been useful.
No matter. Resummoning Marco, you have him go off and do the whole beds thing again, hoping he'll get it done tonight as you and Nora wander off towards the vault elevator. On the way down, you can't help but note that you've been down here way too often in the short time you've been in this dimension.
Also, the mechanism to operate this elevator is really stupid, requiring the use of a pip-boy, of which you only saw one in the entire place.
Like, what the fuck? That's not very well planned out, is it?
Regardless, soon, the both of you arrive downstairs, walking all the way towards where you found that easily-moved luggage. On the way, you have to kill a few more giant cockroaches (where do they even come from? What do they even eat down here?), but it's not long until the two of you start ferrying the goods over to the elevator.
While you're there anyway, you and Nora grab some new vault-suits, what with your old ones being filled with bullet holes. You make another joke about being half naked all the time, but hey, it was entirely justified.
Also, Nora's blush is adorable.
Eventually, after a few trips, you have everything you think you can use out of the vault piled up atop the platform, Nora sending everything up in short order.
Taking all your newly obtained loot over to your warehose house and getting started on taking it apart, you estimate you may need a few more miscellaneous electrical parts to finish the generator, though you're well on your way towards having enough stuff to finish that part of your little project.
Eventually, you're finished with that bit of work, putting everything into neat piles for ease of use later. Taking a moment to look at the sky, you estimate you could get one more thing done before the sun rises once more.
Taking a bit of time, you mention to Nora how the souls of those you ate have to not only obey you, but also answer all your questions as best they can.
It doesn't take long for her to make the connection.
In short order, the both of you start interrogating your lastest meals, asking after any raider bases or stockpiles in the area. Apparently, these guys were just a smaller squad sent from a group based in Lexington, in an old assemby plant. Corvega.
While that is good to know and you will totally pay them a visit, that's quite some distance you're talking about covering, so it'll have to wait a bit. Luckily enough, you also find out about a closer opportunity a bit to the east; an old satellite station has apparently been taken over by raiders that occassionally venture out to terrorize the surrounding settlements for food and whatever else tickles their fancy.
Should be a few hours' march away from Sanctuary, meaning it should be quite possible to massacre them all and return with the loot within a reasonable timeframe.
It isn't long after this that you and Nora retire to your hole in the ground to wait out the sun. You feel that you've made some decent progress on this little Sanctuary project tonight; if only so that you have a few idiots prepared to maintain your turrets for you. Hopefully they'll actually help protect you during the day.
For now, though, back to the main reason you came to this dimension in the first place. Time to train.
Taking a moment while Nora settles in, you look into yourself... and note that time is going significantly faster in there. It seems as though time dilation sped up a lot while you were busy earlier.
While there are no fruit ready to be plucked, you're not one to ignore an opportunity like this. Entering your castle, you call upon the maid(s) to present you with the most persuasive soul within you, making them produce one of those Merchant bitches you ate back when you kidnapped Squealer. Shrugging, you continue on to order her to explain to you how she would persuade, cajole and/or coax someone into doing something, using your perfect memory to perfectly absorb all she has to tell you.
Satisfied, you return unto reality and proceed to train your magic, specifically that whole shortening of the chant of your most-often-used spell.
Speaking the whole chant is becoming very awkward very quickly, and it didn't exactly start out non-awkward.
Funnily enough, you soon finish, shortening the chant down to 'freeze water and shoot it!', cutting the last part of the chant away. Not like you needed it in the first place; the specific aiming is done with your mind anyway, after all.
With that done, you spend a few hours just sharpening your claws against each other, mostly just wanting to see if you could get them to be sharper.
You can.
Pleasantly surprised at your progress this fine day, you return to an old favorite; your shadow powers have been great in the past and they shall become even greater now.
Spending the rest of the day messing around with your transformation power, mostly just trying to speed up or slow down the transformation on different body parts, you're eventually interrupted by a sleepy Nora in the middle of your practice.
"Hey, Gabe," she yawns, "I kinda feel like I need less sleep lately. You think it's because of that magic blood ritual you did to give me powers?"
"Mhm. Could be. You want to practice shooting a bit more?"
"Sure. Just gimme a few moments," she murmurs as she snuggles into you again. Looks like this is a daily ritual now. Ah well, not that you mind particularly.
Emerging from your hole lair a good while after Nora went off to train with your minion, you first take a look around into one of the dilapidated houses; specifically, the one where the settlers built their beds.
Satisfied, you note that they're all sleeping inside. It seems a bit drafty on account of all the holes in the walls and roof, but hey, it's probably better than anything they had for a few months now.
On the way to the place you were described (you mainly just try to keep going eastwards), you happen upon a trashy woman wandering along the long abandoned streets together with more two-headed cattle. After a quick round of introductions, you find out she calls herself 'Trashcan Carla' and apparently travels along a route of several settlements as a trader.
Explains the 'brahmin' carrying all that trash.
She's actually pretty helpful, explaining how to get to Diamond City and what dangers to avoid on the way. After telling her about the new settlement in Sanctuary Hills (well, 'settlement'. It's a work in progress), you part peacefully and soon approach what looks like some kind of surface outcrop of a bunker next to a small tower with a satellite dish attached, but more important to you are the small shack made of wood next to it and the walkways leading up to a little room beneath the dish.
This place looks inhabited.
Asking Nora to hide outside the camp for a bit, you transform into your shadow once again and start to look around the place. Keeping away from the solid building for now, as it has functioning light, you make your way around the place, looking at anything interesting you should be aware of.
You soon realize there are only two raiders present, one hanging around in the bunker-like building you can spy through what you guess used to be a window and another one up on the tower.
What's far more interesting to you, though, are the giant rat-like animals around, with one of them having what looks like a bomb strapped to it.
Because of course, this shit couldn't be easy, could it?
You see four of them in total, though just one of them bombed up. At a guess, these raiders use them as an early alarm system slash living bombs.
After investigating everything, you slither your way up to the tower room and patiently wait as a shadow on the wall for your next victim to look outside. When he next does so and doesn't move anything but his head around, you rematerialize behind him.
Then you jump at him, grab his head and ram it into the wall before he can do anything before using your secure grip to keep him from falling down as you bite into his neck and partake of his blood.
Sucks to be him.
Rickie, stereotypical raider. A typical psychopath through experience and chem abuse, made to be the night guard because nobody else wanted and nobody liked him enough to be pissed he had to do it.
Carefully dropping the body to the side, you listen out for any movement, but it seems you remained undetected. Good shit.
Now, only those rats and the one guy inside left. You can't get inside yourself due to the bright light, at least not as a shadow, but you may be able to lure him out or something... or you could throw stealth to the wind and just barge in to eat him.
Of course, none of that takes those explosive rats into account...
Moving intp position with your new plan, you place yourself so that you have line of sight towards the rats while hopefully being able to reach the last enemy present once he comes out of the door.
Chanting Freeze water and shoot it!, you aim squarely at the bomb strapped to the rat leading the pack, making it blow up in a spectacular explosion.
The bombed rat and two of the others blow up into a small rain of chunks, but the last one survives with just half its' legs missing, starting to make pitiful sounds as it's trying to nuzzle what's left of the others.
Meanwhile, your target comes out the door, weapon drawn and looking around for whoever just triggered the bomb. This is your chance!
Grabbing onto the railing lining the walkway you're on, you throw yourself towards your prey in a parabolic arc, impacting him and slamming him into the ground with several broken bones.
Ignoring his screams, you hurry to eat him before he manages to expire, biting into his neck and drinking his blood faster than it can escape via the places where his bones broke through his skin all along his legs and ribcage.
Braydon really didn't like being a raider, but being one was all he knew. So when, once again, the begging of their victims drove him to be sleepless, he made the decision.
He would just do stuff at the base, forever, no matter how good he was in a fight. So he went and finagled the recipes for chems out of the resident chem-maker, he learned how to maintain and even build primitive weapons and he always took the night shift for guard duty.
In exchange, he never had to look their victims in the eyes when they murdered them, just look at the plunder the others brought back and know what they did.
He could live with that, until one night, he found out why humanity disliked the darkness...
Getting off of the mangled corpse and wandering over to put the last rat out of its misery with an ice shard, Nora soon comes running with her weapon drawn, seemingly relieved at seeing you unharmed.
"I heard an explosion, what happened," she asks you, looking wide eyed at the many chunks of rat lying in a wide radius. "These guys had some kinds of giant rats as guard dogs and kamikaze bombers, with a bomb actually strapped to one of them," you explain, pointing at where the explosion went off.
"I just blew the thing up from afar after sneak-eating one of the guards, then jumped on the other one when he came out to see who set the bomb off."
"You sure do love jumping on people, don't you? You did the same back in Concord, after all."
"What can I say? It just works. Now who wants to assault a fortified position?"
Nora just smiles and shakes her head as she follows you inside the bunker outcrop, entering a door leading further inside.
Finding yourselves in a flight of stairs, you consider how to approach this place, even as you continue onwards...
Only to be brought up short at the end of the stairs leading you underground.
"Is this a laser-based tripwire? Because it looks like a laser-based tripwire. In plain sight."
"Yeah. I mean, these things aren't the easiest traps to hide, but this is pretty stupid placement even at the best of times."
Looks like the sheer absurdity of this world has caught you unawares yet again. Ah well, maybe you can come back here later and see how this thing was made.
If a bunch of raiding savages can assemble this contraption, you'd like to think so can you.
Stepping over the poorly disguised trap, you and Nora find yourself in some kind of entrance room, complete with a secretary's desk, though it's obviously not been in use for a few centuries.
So... How shall you do this? The lights in here are way too bright to let you skulk around as a shadow, but luckily, you aren't limited to that one power...
"Okay, here's the plan. I'll summon the sickness filed dude again, use him to keep the raiders down the best I can while I go through them at top speed. You, on the other hand, follow me with a bit of a distance while I do this so you're outside the field and take any easy shots you can, finish off enemies, that kinda thing."
"Alright, sounds like a plan. Just so long as I don't get inside that stupid field, anyway."
And so you do. Nora stay where she is for a bit while you continue onwards and summon soul number 15, his field washing over you without effect, stopping just before reaching Nora.
Alright, let's do this.
Taking a left at the intersection you come upon, you find yourself in a dark hallway, with what you recognize as the signs for restrooms next to a door to your left and an open door further ahead.
You can hear rhythmic slapping from the lavatories- sounds like someone's fucking in there. Works out just fine for you. Barging inside, you quickly note your minion's weakening field seems to have taken effect, judging by the groans coming from inside that stall.
And not the sexy kinds of groans, either, this shit actually works.
Ripping the door to the stall in question open, you see about what you expected; raiders fucking and using the broken down remains of a toilet as a seat. You didn't expect the part where it's anal sex, but hey, not like you care particularly.
They're still an easy meal after they both just came and were affected by the weakening field.
Pulling the girl off of the guy's cock with a 'popp'ing sound, you hand her to your minion for a sec while you reach out and drive both your clawed hands into his throat, never giving him any time to react to what's happening.
With that done, you turn towards the girl, considering her. Well, you haven't been discovered yet, so you may as well find out about her before deciding what to do with her. Taking hold of her neck, you dismiss your soul for now as you drag her off back towards where you and Nora split up, confusing her for a moment before she gets what's going on.
After a thorough bit of interrogation, you find that this plain girl is a normal raider, for the most part. She isn't in the business for any psychopathic desire to hurt people, she's just doing what she's told and given food in exchange.
Similar reasons apply as to why she let that other raider fuck her ass; as well as all the other raiders that wanted to, judging from what she's telling you. This person here seems to lack any actual drive to decide what happens to her and where her life goes, any and all pain or shame are irrelevant to her next to doing what she's told.
She seems almost like a robot, just that you'd met Codsworth and knew robots actually could have more drive than her. Heck, the only reason everyone seems to fuck her ass nowadays seems to be that she had a miscarriage during a gangbang when she got pregnant previously and nobody wanted to clean up another mess like that.
And yeah, no, you didn't want to know that last bit.
Aside from the whole 'being a hole for everyone' bit, she seems to have been just about the same as any other raider, though. Nothing special you can find out from interrogating her.
Considering her words, appearance and bearing, you can't help but sum up your impression of who she is in a concise, but philosophically deep manner.
"...It's like if beige was a person."
Turning to Nora, who, if anything, seems more perturbed by this young woman's complete self-abandonment than the trail of corpses the two of you have started producing lately, you ask for her opinion on your latest train of thought. "Hey Nora, think she would be a good fit for Sanctuary?"
"Well, I don't know... On the one hand, she's a raider, or rather, used to be. On the other hand, that's mostly because she's just doing whatever someone last told her. May be worth it to bring her along, just for another pair of hands."
Agreeing with her analysis, you turn to the girl, whose name, as you found out, is apparently Elsie. And yes, even her name is bland.
"Alright, Elsie," and she perks up at the mention of her name, likely expecting her next set of orders. Not that's she's wrong. "You're gonna wait for us here while we deal with the rest of this camp, then you'll help us carry the loot back home and we'll see what you can do there, alright?"
Wordlessly, she nods. She really just does whatever you tell her.
Returning to your original plan and setup, you resummon your weakening soul in the hallway you first took before you found Elsie and continue onwards. You emerge on a metal walkway just like the kind outside, seeing a raider standing a bit further blocking the way towards the ramp leading onto the floor.
On said floor, you see four raiders lounging about, though you hear sounds from elsewhere in the facility. It's likely more enemies will be on their way soon after things get loud.
Also, you really should move your weakening soul further into the middle of the room, so that Nora can come in and throw in supporting fire.
Stretching your hand out, you intone: Freeze water and shoot it!
You don't actually need to point where you're aiming, but it's a nice aid to get the aiming juuuust right. Nailing your target through the throat and actually tearing out a good bit of it, you can't help but be slightly impressed when he gurgles angrily and starts charging at you with his knife, even as the other enemies downstairs try to figure out what's going on.
He must be on some quality drugs.
Nora, meanwhile, has taken the opportunity presented by you and your minion steadily walking towards the enemy, lining up her shot with her laser musket.
Her aim is true, and your enemy is soon lacking a brain. More so than he already was, anyway; his entire head just pretty much vaporized in that blast.
You, meanwhile, have covered about half the distance towards the ramp, while your foes seem to have gotten a clue and are now approaching the same place, while half of them are taking potshots at you. Luckily enough, you're bulletproof, and your soul is staying behind a bit in an effort to not arouse too much suspicion.
Continuing your inexorable march towards the ramp, you start to cast once again... when you see one of them has started throwing something at you. Shit!
Reacting quicker than you'd thought possible, you adjust your aim and shoot your ice shard right at the hand of the raider that is about to throw the molotov cocktail, piercing through it and making it drop the thing.
Everyone is looking at him, then the explosive.
The next moment, it explodes.
In a burst of flame, the cocktail explodes, heavily burning all raiders in the room except the one too far away to be hit.
Those hit ones are currently rolling on the floor, and judging from their screams, they are not happy. Those are not happy screams.
You can hardly contain your smug grin at this scene.
Meanwhile, Nora threw aside her musket and took up another gun, letting off a shot at one of the injured raiders.
Unfortunately, the frantic movement as they try to put out the flames lead to a missed shot. No matter.
You arrive at the ramp. From here, you can either keep on casting at everything or you can move over and end those raiders, though the uninjured one and reinforcements may be incoming.
Rushing over, you grab onto the one that tried to molotov you, pulling him up and biting into his neck with relish, even while the other ones struggle to their feet, one facing you, the other one limpimg away.
Barry, random raider. Not in it for being evil or an asshole, just to feed himself better than as some dirt farmer in the wastes.
Taking a quick look around (and ignoring Nora's missed shot), you count two raiders facing you, the burned one having pulled out a knife... and the other one apparently went to get a stimpack they had lying around.
As it is injected, you can actually see the burned skin receding a good bit... leaving behind freshly healed surface. These things are fucking good; like, tinkertech level good.
You really need to figure out how they're made and if you can steal the process.
Slashing your claws across his arm, you rip open his burn wounds, causing him to scream in pain even as he attempts to attack you in turn.
As he tries his best to stab you with his knife, flailing in a panic and weakened by the aura of your summoned helper, you're a bit distracted by what comes into the room through the nearest doorframe.
A half-naked female raider, with her hair done in the most comically ill-fitting twintails you have ever seen, bearing a fucking machine gun.
As she charges in, she screams at the top of her lungs, opening fire haphazardly and chunking the raider currently fighting you.
Luckily enough, you reacted quick enough and dismissed your summoned soul before it got similarly chunked.
You look at this new threat and, for the first time, cast your newest spell in a proper comabt situation. Feel the bite of winter in your bones!
The effect is immediate and noticeable; the raider winces and her aim is far worse afterwards.
You, meanwhile, kept on slowly walking towards the raider that kept themself out of trouble all this time, consistently shooting at you. Whether they kept on doing so because they're too stupid to notice the bullets don't hurt you or just have no better idea, you don't know.
Soon after, pandemonium happens. The raider sends bullets flying everywhere, few of them actually hitting you. The same can't be said about the poor fucker you position before you.
There's not much left of him.
Nora, meanwhile, opens fire on this new enemy, clipping her shoulder. You quickly establish eye contact and direct her towards the last enemy in the room that escaped your rampage so far, getting a nod in return.
Time to focus on the minigun girl.
Though, your vault suit got pretty fucked up again. Nonstop fire turned it into blue rags by now, pretty much.
Striding your way up to her, having given up on preserving your suit a long time ago, you laugh in her face as she keeps on screaming and shooting at you.
Grabbing onto her minigun, you push into it, driving it into her stomach and pushing her backwards until her back meets the wall.
Once there, you slap into the side of the gun with all your might, throwing it out of her hands and letting you access her body itself. Which you do.
Slamming your hand into her stomach, you use your claws to cut through it up to her spine, gripping it even as the other hand goes to her face, pushing her head against the wall and giving you a free approach to her neck.
Ignoring her struggles and attempts to claw at you, you rear back and open your mouth all the way, showcasing your teeth to the empty air... before you ram your head into your target, biting down with great relish.
It gets better every time.
Ack-Ack. That was how she was called. It wasn't always how she was called, but then, she didn't have a choice in the matter, did she?
When she was a little girl and the caravan was robbed, she did much as most people in her position would. She curled into a ball and cried, trying to ignore the sounds of rape and gunshots when the monsters were done.
Until, that is, a hand grabbed her. So when she got a dick shoved in her face and told to suck it, or else, well, what choice did she really have? The gun pointed at her head made it clear.
She knew he would shoot her anyway, as they'd done with some of the others, as one had just done with her mother, but she was so, so scared. So she did the best she could, and when the gun came closer, she threw herself at his dick, trying to get it deeper and live just a little longer, she kept going even as she choked and wanted to come up for air, but she wanted to live just that much more...
And she made a sound. Ack-ack-ack-ack...
The raider holding a gun to her head thought that was hilarious. So he called the others over after he finished down her throat, and everyone got a turn with the little girl henceforth known as Ack-Ack, using her mouth to clean off the dicks they'd just used to rape half the people she ever knew before shooting them.
The other half they'd just shot.
Ack-Ack had amused them so much, they decided to keep her and bring her back with them. And so little Ack-Ack grew up among raiders. Monsters. And eventually, she got along with a few of them, the ones that didn't make her go 'ack-ack' too often.
As she grew up, the raiders slowly started to consider her one of them, and after a few years, they gave her a gun and let her come along on raids.
She loved getting to be the one that would hurt others, rather than being hurt, so much so that everyone praised 'their little Ack-Ack' for being so enthusiastic. Over the years, she became more raider than the gang's pet, and when the current boss got a bullet to the head, she became the new one by virtue of shooting the other claimants faster than they shot her.
So Ack-Ack came to lead the gang that originally named her so. One day, they got their hands on a minigun when they ambushed a merchant caravan, and she immediately fell in love with it when she heard it make the same sound she did. From then on, she decided, the name Ack-Ack would be the sound others made- her gun, the people she shot with it and the people she raped with the toys she inherited from the last boss.
In fact, she was busy punishing one of the other raiders with her toys when she heard a mysterious stranger murdering her men...
Letting the dead body slide down the wall you were pressing it against, you turn around to see Nora execute the last enemy in the room. Looks like you're done here, then.
As Nora joins you downstairs, you can't help but smile at her as you step out of the remants of your vault suit. The sheer amount of bullets you took (and ignored) turned the (though admittedly tough fabric) into what reminds you more of a pile of rags than any actual clothing.
Consequently, you only really have to step out the legs of what's left, as you took the fewest inpacts there. The rest of the suit is in a sufficiently bad state you don't even really need to do anything- you just shrug and the arms fall off, the back of the suit falls away when you lean back a bit...
Nora, once again confronted by a naked vampire, blushes, but just stares you in the face defiantly otherwise. Looks like she's decided to try to ignore your nudity.
Heh.
Putting on your best smug grin, you raise your eyebrow and tell Nora: "If i didn't know better, I'd think you'd hoped to get me naked again. Anything you wanna say, Nora?"
Blushing even harder, Nora just looks away. Looks like someone's getting shy... or maybe actually secretly hoped to see you naked again.
Interesting...
Either way, you still have to explore the rest of this place. May as well go back and ask that mentally disadvantaged girl what you'll find ahead of time.
Saying as much to Nora, the two of you get back to Elsie and question her as to what you can expect to see when further intruding into this place.
"Well, there's the big room with all the others, the small room right there," she says while pointing at the stairs you didn't take earlier, "that goes into the big room, and then a small room again that goes into the boss room. She has lots of stuff in there. Oh, and another room opposite the boss room, but nobody got the door open, so it's just there."
Well, that was... helpful? You're not really sure what you'd expected here.
Thanking Elsie (she doesn't visibly react), you and Nora wander off towards that 'boss room' she'd mentioned. Figures anything really important would be in there, after all.
On the way, the two of you chat a bit about how disturbing Elsie's whole... thing is (to Nora, at least, you just don't care), but it's not much of a walk until you find the place you were described. Inside, well...
Inside you find what looks honestly more like a bdsm film set or something. Lots of leather, whips, those small paddles meant to hit people, loads of such paraphernalia line the walls, most lying on low cupboards most likely brought into this room just for this purpose.
The walls are grey-white beton, much like the rest of this whole bunker, but not even that detracts from the atmosphere of the room, though said atmosphere is mostly evoked through the nearly naked woman bent over in the middle of the room, clothed only in a few leather straps, blindfolded and hanging by a strap connected to the ceiling.
"Mistress, are you back?" she asks when she hears someone coming in. "Please punish me some mooore..."
Smirking, you step closer towards Nora, whispering in her ear: "Yes, Nora, why don't you punish her a bit?"
Nora, wide-eyed and blushing up an actual storm by now, swallows hard.
And nods. Tentative and slowly, but she nods.
Walking over to the bound woman, Nora pulls off her blindfold and looks her square in the eyes, trying to present a strong front.
"I just wanted you to know who your new mistress is. Toy." she says, earning a wide-eyed look of fear... and the scent of arousal in the air. Looks like this is the exact right approach to take with this woman.
Stepping towards the nearest wall, Nora moves her hand along several of the toys arrayed in easy grabbing range, eventually coming back with a ballgag in hand. "Now... Open wide," she orders the bound woman, who dutifully does as she's told, allowing Nora to gag her and bind the ball in place, with the straps holding it in place going all over and behind her head.
That's one way to shut up a captive, you suppose.
Moving behind her so that she can't see what she's doing, Nora then starts going through the toys laid over there. Your newest victim, on the other hand, is left with no choice but to look forwards at you while thinking about what's about to happen to her, with a great view of your naked form.
And your massive throbbing erection. No need to keep it in right now, after all.
After a few moments of you smiling down at her, Nora comes back, with a black paddle in hand that has the sign for radioactivity imprinted on it. Fitting enough, you suppose.
Stepping to the backside of your captive, she slowly runs her free hand along said backside, looking over to you and seeing you in all your glory for the first time. Funnily enough, she's blushing much less than she did earlier, though she still throws you an appreciative glance when you look at her.
"Now... Who's been a bad girl, hm?" she asks your shared victim of the night. When she doesn't answer, what with the gag in the way, Nora withdraws her free hand, she repeats "I asked, WHO was a bad girl?", slapping the paddle onto her buttocks.
That gives a reaction, namely a muffled moan. Apparently still not satisfied, Nora keeps on swinging her paddle, occassionally asking if your little toy was a bad girl, justifying her punishment when she doesn't 'answer properly'.
Eventually, she just calls her a bad girl, having ascertained she prefers to be punished over saying she was bad. She can't, of course, talk, but everyone in the room maintains the polite fiction, anyway.
After she's had some time to work off some tension, you step forwards, drawing both of their attention immediately and making her stop for a moment. "Now, now," you drawl with a smug grin, "it's a bit unfair to punish her when she hasn't had a chance to admit she needs the punishment, is it?" you chuckle, earning a confused look from the woman, and an anticipatory smile from Nora.
Arriving at the front of your lucky find, you transform your fingers into claws, using them to brush back the hair that got trapped under a strap when Nora put on the gag, freaking her out by the inhuman appendages wandering over her face.
"How about this, I'll take out the gag, and if you're a good girl, we'll punish you as much as we want?" you speak down to her face in a patronizing voice. Judging by the reddening of her cheeks, you're doing something right.
Loosening the straps holding the gag in place, you take it out, wet with spit that it is, and replace it with your dick. Taking a step forward, you thrust it into her mouth, establishing eye contact with her even while doing so and showing her just a hint of teeth. "And don't forget, if you bite, I'll bite back." And screw 'a hint', you show your teeth in all their glory.
You don't really feel pain the same way you did when alive, but you'd rather avoid getting your dick bitten off, so you're a bit blunt with the message.
Your newest toy, on the other hand, shudders before a new wave of fluid runs down her legs. Looks like she likes being treated this way, after all. Her mouth is making for a very pliable orifice, too, taking as much of your dick inside as she can as you fuck her face, what with her bound in place, her tongue licking all along your length.
This still won't do, though. This isn't a show you're putting on for Nora, here, so you turn your eyes back to her, standing behind your victim and breathing hard.
"Seems like she's a little slow on the uptake... How about you help her be a good girl, Nora?" you ask, miming a hit with your hand where your devoted little cocksucker can't see it.
Smirking, Nora immediately get it, and when you next thrust your hips, she slaps her paddle down on her ass, making her whole body rock forwards a bit at the sensation and gag just a little as your tip enters her throat. Just what you wanted, really.
"Oh my, you really need some work to become a good girl. Good thing we're here to help you practice, hm?" you ask when she has to stop licking you due to the repeated gagging.
So it goes for a few minutes, your cock repeatedly entering her throat just a bit and slowly letting her get used to the sensation, before you look into Nora's eyes, silently telling her you're about to go... deeper.
And so you do, suddenly taking a small step forwards on your next thrust, forcing your dick down her throat and cutting off her air supply. Now she starts really gagging, but you take no notice of this, continuing to thrust in synchronicity with Nora's hits, just with your cock beyond what she's comfortable with taking the entire time.
Eventually, her struggles slow, causing you to quickly take a step back and let her breathe, though with your dick still in her mouth the entire time.
"What's this? I thought you were supposed to be a good girl?" you mock her, even while Nora has taken this reprieve to feel up her ass again, her hand nearing what you're pretty sure is your toys' pussy.
"I- I abh-" she answers with a rough voice, obviously having been affected by the frequent gagging you'd been subjecting her to and muffled by your cock, to boot.
"Ah, ah, ah," you make, smirking again. "Good girls do not talk. They take dicks or lick pussies, but their mouths aren't used to make sounds," you say, voice dripping with condescending glee, as you once more step forwards, fucking her throat again.
After a short while, the stimulation of this situation and her mouthpussy becomes too much, and you decide against holding back your orgasm as you pump it down her throat, Nora having given up using the paddle the moment she realized what's going on, just pushing onto the woman's abused cheeks to make sure she takes it all as deep as possible.
Stepping back once more, you focus on Nora, saying in a doubtful voice "Well, she's barely adequate, but she needs lots of work before she becomes a good girl. Maybe she'll do better with a woman?" you ask, indicating the two of you switch with your hand outside her field of view.
Smiling almost malevolently, Nora comes over to her head, even as you take the opposite side to reach her back.
"Well, well, well, let's see how this disappointing girl will do," she talks down to her, not giving her a chance to answer before she grabs ahold of her head and positions it right before her crotch. "Now hold still."
She does hold still as Nora starts unzipping her vault suit, slowly sliding it down on herself, revealing she wasn't wearing underwear all this time. Smirking towards you, with you smirking right back, she pushes the head staring transfixed at her pussy towards said pussy, immediately making your toy start licking away.
You, meanwhile, were feeling up her ass much the same way Nora had been earlier, enjoying the shivering as the red, abused flesh is getting stroked all over.
It's painful, but she actually loves it, judging by the increased fluid production.
It isn't much longer that you can withstand the urge to stick it into the readily presented pussy, positioning your cock and thrusting inside in one smooth motion. Your fucktoy shivers in joy, though apparently slowing up front, as Nora starts scolding her even as you start spanking her already abused ass to encourage her to be a "good girl" and stick her tongue in there.
It's a few minutes of very intense sex that follows, with you and Nora flirting outrageously over your shared slave every now and then, before you finally come into her, filling her womb up.
It's another thing you'd noticed- your ejaculation didn't really reduce, no matter how much you came.
It's another useful little thing, really.
Nora, having come a few times while you were both fucking your toy, throws you a questioning look, but you wave her off silently. You have one more hole to fill before you're done here.
Somehow, that thought must have come across in your nonverbal communication, because Nora grins the widest you have ever seen her, before taking hold of your captive's head around her jaw.
"Now, you want to be a good girl for master, right?", she asks, making her nod herself. "So just relax now while he takes his fun..."
As she's talking, you withdraw your dick from her pussy, slowly lining it up with her asshole instead. Once she can feel your tip on her anal ring, she tenses up for a moment, before relaxing just as Nora said, letting you push into her, spreading her ring around your intruding length.
Slowly and deeply.
You push into her ass until you bottom out, just enjoying the heat and tightness around your cock. It doesn't take long, however, for you to start thrusting again, which is about the time you start spanking her, too, feeling the vibrations of your hits deep inside her. Nora, too, forces her to eat her out with renewed enthusiasm.
This little slave has a long night ahead of her...
Eventually, your fucktoy can't keep it up any longer, having been fucked repeatedly in all holes and sexually used and abused by the two of you.
Taking her exhausted form off of the harness keeping her in place, you carry her over to the bedroll in the corner, where she falls asleep almost immediately.
Staying silent so as to not disturb her, you and Nora walk out of the room, her looking at you a little awkwardly now that the sexual energy of what you just did starts to dissipitate, but not willing to speak up for now.
Oh, and she forgot her vault suit inside, though you sure won't mention that, either. She makes for a lovely view, or will once she can stand without shivering after all those orgasms.
Letting Nora take it a little slower, you summon the same soul you used the last time you needed something opened. After repeating your little trick with the ice lockpick, you get him to work.
It is, indeed, not long until the doors open... to admit unto you a room positively filled with giant cockroaches.
You are quite done with this shit.
Slamming the doors shut again and ordering your soul to hold them shut if those things try to come through, you take a moment to think about how to do this... idly noting Nora having awkwardly shuffled as far away from the doors as she can. Heh
Thinking on it, the range should be just about enough to affect the whole room, from what you saw before you closed the doors...
Taking a stance, you cast Make the world a colder place towards the room, hopefully aiming the spell right. Now all it needs is a bit of time before everything in there dies of the cold. Insects, after all, aren't known for being out and about in cold weather for a reason.
Taking another look around for anything to bar the doors with more permanently, the best you can come up with is an old broom, but it'll just have to do.
Sticking it through the door's handles, you're fairly sure the cockroaches won't be coming through any time soon. Dismissing your soul, who still looks fairly freaked out on account of the SUDDEN GIANT INSECTS, you turn to Nora, who nods at you appreciatively for not forcing her to deal with this.
Still naked, the two of you get to gathering the corpses of the raiders you killed, amassing a small fortune in guns, as well as several... fruits? You honestly have no idea, but you suppose these guys would probably have attacked farms or something in the area to feed themselves.
Maybe they can be planted or something, so you make a point to gather them up, in any case.
Aside from that, you get a bit of ammo for the weapons they used, as well a a few stimpacks and what looks like a small assortment of drugs. Nora's got no idea what some of these are, either, though she recognizes a syringe filled with 'med-x' as something her husband apparently showed her once.
All else you find are a few molotov-cocktails and a whole load of junk. Mainly electronic junk, which is what you came here for. Now if only those giant cockroaches would hurry up and die already...
Taking out the broom, you open the doors and find a whole bunch of dead insects.
Two of them seem to still be weakly moving, but you put a swift end to that via repeated applications of Ice Shards. It's surprsingly therapeutic, actually.
Inside a small toolbox on a desk further into the room, you find a weird piece of metal Nora calls a magnetic key. You suppose you may as well try it out on that door without lock upstairs later.
Aside from that, all you find are some knicknacks and more potentially useful junk. As well as, funnily enough, another broom.
Meeting Elsie again in the room you left her in, you slide the mag-key against where a lock would normally be, making the door slide open and allowing entry into some kind of military staff room...
And a little weirdly shaped container than makes Nora freak out upon seeing it.
"That's a mini-nuke," she says when you raise an eyebrow at her. "They're supposed to be safe to handle, but this thing contains enough firepower to fucking blow us into little chunks!"
Okay, what the fuck. They have a fucking nuke just lying around? The fuck is this shit? Like, Scion destroyed nukes the world over when he appeared, and here you are, with one right in your face!
You'll still take it, of course, but you'll store it somewhere nice and safe. Like, say, inside the vault. Inside the vault you aren't inside of.
Making note of being fucking careful around the mini-nuke, you survey the rest of the room. A few packets of food and bottles of 'nuka cola' on the main desks, a few guns of various kinds Nora is gushing over and... well hello.
A 'covert ops manual' ripe for the taking. While you may hold doubts as to the validity of anything written therein, taking a look can't hurt, either.
Taking the loot you found in the staff room and adding it to the respective piles you and Nora had already established (The nuke safely to the side), you consider the sheer amount of stuff you're looking at.
This will take several runs, you're pretty sure, even with your new baggage carrier in the form of Elsie. Not to mention the sleeping slave in the fuckroom, and you're not sure how much time you have left until the sun comes up again.
Clearly, you need a plan.
Once more taking the clothes of the raider's corpses and improvising some bags out of them to carry stuff with, you and Nora bundle up a bunch of weapons and electronic junk before you bid Nora and Elsie farewell for now.
The plan is that they return to Sanctuary, stash the loot and have a good long rest, then set out towards the satellite bunker in the evening so they arrive at about nightfall, whereupon the whole team can carry the rest of this stuff off.
In the meantime, you have a bit of a break as you guard the loot and the slave. Perfect for training, really.
Getting back to your fiddling around with your shadow powers, you finally manage to transform more than a hand or so at once without transforming the rest of your body.
Truly, a day (night?) of greatness.
Spending most of the day working on making your senses even harder to affect than normal ones, making an actually appreciable difference, you spend the rest of it working on your shadow transformation again.
You finally figured out (and man, did you feel stupid when you thought of it) that you do, technically, speed up your transformation on certain parts of your body when you transform partially, then stop transforming entirely to get the effect you want.
So, why couldn't you just speed up your transformation in general?
Well. You could.
You just never tried, really.
After a few seconds of self-recrimnation, you got to practicing with this idea. While you can't tell a difference in your overall speed yet, you're optimistic something is changing as you concentrate and try.
It isn't long after this that Nora and Elsie come back. In the meantime, your newly-acquired slave has woken up, but you just directed her to eat and drink her fill from the various foodstuff you'd thrown together the previous night and ignored her beyond that.
With all four of you, you have a significantly easier time carrying off the loot. You have to leave your broom behind, but it's probably for the best.
You arrive back at Sanctuary without further interruptions, unloading your load in the workshop house. In the meantime, the settlers seem to have taken a look at the fruits Nora brought with her the previous day, they're apparently called tatos or something.
You don't give a fuck, particularly, but hey, if they can farm the stuff, you won't tell them not to.
Going back over the blueprints, you and Nora agree to try and build that generator. It's pretty complicated and doesn't produce much electricity, but certainly enough to run that water purifier.
And so, you set to work.
It's a harrowing few hours, but you eventually manage to clobber together a working generator, out of nothing more than a load of copper, wire, a few pipes, a bit of nuclear fission and a bunch of metal plates.
And a few other knicknacks, but honestly, you're pretty proud of yourself over this.
Nodding to Nora over your latest success, the two of you decide to set everything up to start generating potable water for the settlement.
And your thralls and other mortal minions, of course.
It's a bit of a workout to lug all the purifier parts over to the river, but you can do it just fine, especially as you get the minions and the settlers to help (aside from the karen, her bitching is excrutiating on your unwillingness to kill any 'real' people where Nora can see).
After a bit of fiddling and Nora going back to grab the waterproof cable you need, just in case, the thing starts working. You now have a stable source of drinking water in Sanctuary! The idiots do have a rather happy look on their faces over this.
Deciding to use the moment, you and Nora shoo the minions away to go do whatever minions do when you're busy otherwise as you get to assembling another turret.
It's really astounding that science in this dimension advanced so far even an untrained amateur such as yourself can throw together a machine that can independently recognize friend from foe and shoot at only the latter, like this, just with some random materials, a gun and a normal blueprint.
A blueprint you've naturally memorized forever.
While the generator was harder to make, the turrets are, objectively speaking, the more complicated machine, only made possible through what you can only call superscience.
Once the thing's done and placed, you're dangerously close to sunrise, so you and Nora, together with your minions, retire to the hole in the wall that is your current lair.
... You may need a bigger place, one of these days.
Sitting there and reminiscing what you did over the last few days, you can't help but focus on the incredible scientific bullshit you'd seen so far in this new dimension.
Laser weapons, power armors, advanced computing and/or robotics, several different kinds of drugs looking different from anything you'd ever heard of...
You can't help but desire this stuff for yourself. With the knowledge and designs common in this version of Earth, you could easily pose as a tinker back on Earth Bet, in addition to your other powers, and that's not even starting on the possibility of having others create the things whose designs you stole while you're busy putting your perfect memory and superior intellect to use in creating new designs for machines, weapons, drugs and so on based on those you stole...
Or just use the time to get better with magic instead, as you've already experienced just how much use you could get out of petty cantrips so far, and you know you've barely scratched the surface of what you can do.
Taking a moment to look inside yourself, you grimace when you see just how slow everything moves.
Unfortunately, you'll have to brave the slowed time to eat the one fruit your tree grew since you last came to pluck them. Breathing yourself in, you waste no time to tell the maid in attendance to bring you over to the tree, whereupon you make hurry to eat your bounty before getting out again.
You spend most of the day working on your ice shard spell, trying to once again cut down on your chant and increase damage.
Results are... mixed, to say the least.
While you make great progress on the chant, sometimes getting a few flecks of ice to appear even when not saying the full one, you're somewhat stuck on making them bigger and sharper.
You can manage sharper, and even making them shoot faster is possible, but they just won't get bigger. You actually have to work some of the resulting frustration out by roughly fucking the slave, eventually making a somewhat drowsy Nora join you.
It's actually a lot of fun, but only afterwards you notice how much time you spent on sex instead of training.