When the Brotherhood of Steel arrived, it did so with all the grandeur a self-entitled army of religious fanatics might wish for.

The Prydwen, immense testament to its might, forged on through the sky, 40 thousand tons of material held up and moved through its superior technology. It was teeming with activity as observations and reports made their way to the relevant command centers, vertibirds were boarded by their Lancers and the men they would carry to prepare the ground for their coming.

And throughout it all, none realized that one of the clouds hanging just a bit deeper was just a little unnatural, just a little unlike the clouds around it.

Down on the ground and across the Commonwealth, the Minutemen exchanged glances, maintained their equipment and corrected positioning of their artillery. Some of it was built with hastily scavenged materials, the technologically inclined among them following the booklet of instructions they all could receive, but even more were made purposefully, not assembled with random stuff, but each piece specifically constructed to do what it did.

They looked powerful. Dangerous. And above all, nobody was used to that kind of thing. There had to be a big factory or something for them somewhere, tales of the pre-war buildings and their full capabilities if they were to be restored circulating amongst the men and women coming together to defend the Commonwealth against threats within and without.

"Aircraft sighted!" The alarm rang out, small squadrons of what a modern person may call a fighter jet growing active in response, sleepy, but determined pilots executing the same maneuvers dozens of times over.

They were ready, but not yet taking off, waiting for a signal to be sent.

Preston Garvey frowned, looking over half-finished maps and extensive notation and also eyeing the little figurines made out of solid steel for him to move around as the battle progressed. It was pretty silly, but Gabriel's way of lightening the mood always helped him. Even if he was having a small headache from staying awake for the past few days instead of sleeping like his body was calling for him to.

It wouldn't be long now. He quietly kept his mind clear, waiting for Gabriel to ring through.

"I still call bullshit," Kate said, reclining on her soft chair. "How is this even guard duty?"

Nora sipped from her mud-juice, as the drink was affectionately called, through a straw. "You know how he gets about this. Just let him play his war games and we can swoop in and finish them off for a few quick meals."

At the same time, Taylor Anne Hebert was standing far to the east, aside the lines of Minutemen and walking artillery positioning themselves. There was nothing living around her beside herself, any forms of life devoured by the ravenous maws of her swarms and even structures broken down and decomposed until an absolutely desolate wasteland was all that remained, merely stones and sandy earth.

She did not want to bother with any distractions for what was to come. Her powers surged, bugs merging into enormous beetles, their minds subsumed by her own.

Bombadier beetles were fascinating insects. They could also be scaled up massively using certain morphing substances. The results had had to be destroyed just in case, for they were too destructive to be let loose outside of her influence, but she could make use of them temporarily all the same.

Aboard the Prydwen, Elder Maxson, the leader of this chapter, gave a signal. A pre-recorded message begun playing as the majestic airship sailed over the ruins of Boston, correcting its course towards the west to an extent.

"People of the Commonwealth. Do not interfere. Our intentions are peaceful." For what would they have to gain by caring about such little matters as these primitives' lives? The Brotherhood was out to secure humanity's future, not be bogged down by its least components.

"We are the Brotherhood of Steel. All of you will be peacefully executed and repurposed."

Elder Maxson frowned. That was not what the message was supposed to proclaim. "Your blood and fat and shall lubricate the chains driven into your descendants' flesh even as your pitiful bodies shall be burned into fuel for our engines," the speakers continued, the voice, originally one of their own, twisting and changing, growing deeper and gaining an otherworldly echo. "Nothing shall remain of this land but wretched husks driven for our sport."

Something was very, very wrong.

"That's the signal!" Preston Garvey shouted, gesturing for the radio operatives inside the Castle to whip the entirety of the Minutemen into action. "Go, go, go!"

Hack giggled, a multicolored wave of light glowing inside the Songbird's broken and desecrated eyes.

The sudden changes in the announcement surprised the brotherhood members sallying out to survey the unfamiliar land their expedition had come to find, but they were members of the Brotherhood of Steel. This strange deviation would not stop them from doing as they were supposed to, from the Paladins out to secure a perimeter around the temporary base over the Lancers dutifully keeping their vertibirds in flight over to the Scribes and Proctors seeing to the proper continuation of their operations.

Questions would be asked, of Elder Maxson and by him. The Brotherhood of Steel did not abide by childish jokes. All the same, none of them would be stopped.

Except they were, for hostilities had officially begun.

The Brotherhood's vertibirds spread out widely, beginning an initial purge- any supermutants, ghouls or similar subhuman scum was to be wiped out, fired upon by great miniguns mounted on the vehicles and manned by those that were in position to do so. However, fire was returned upon them from somewhere they did not expect.

From afar, a volley of projectiles hit the Brotherhood's vaunted aerial vehicles, doing little to no damage. However, each impact scattered a rust-brown, sand-like substance, coarse and yet smooth at the same time as one Paladin found when he caught some to hold it up to his eyes.

Then the metal of his power armor began to rust. Rapidly.

Unbelieving, he screamed out a warning. "It is an insidious weapon, brothers and sisters! Anything hit dissolves!" Not waiting for an answer from the radio connected to the operating center aboard the Prydwen, he turned toward his comrades. "Everyone out, now!"

He grabbed a Scribe and the vertibird's lancer, already feeling the machine's even movement shudder as it was affected by the strange weapon, and jumped, estimating the fall to be survivable, if rough, for the two as long as they were held in his power armor's arms. And indeed, despite a cracked rib and no small amounts of screaming, both made it to the ground alive.

The Paladin grimaced. The fire had come form the north, but there was no saying where exactly this unseen enemy was hiding from their righteous wrath.

The Brotherhood forces up in the air were directing their fire against the shots aimed towards them, miniguns, gatling lasers and heavy assault rifles doing everything they could to hold up the rain of deadly cannon balls taking apart any vertibirds they hit over a few minutes at most. There were no orders from the Prydwen on how to proceed, no communications open to them at all, so they had to use their best judgement out in the field based upon their situation and the resources at their disposal.

Which meant that some decided to return to the Prydwen post-haste to gather their strength and consider their next actions once they knew what was suppressing communications while others were determined to charge down the attackers bombarding them with lethal ammunition (for anyone not wearing a power armor to catch their falls).

However, neither case was prepared when, in the midst of the momentary lull of confusion, several flying objects approached from the north, some of them breaking off and circling around.

The first of the Minutemen piloting a purpose-built fighter jet crossed with a helicopter gave the Brotherhood of Steel the finger as he activated the disintegrator gun.

As the battle raged across the skies, strafing runs and quick maneuvers opposed by steeled determination and bitter defiance, the ground was seeing its own kind of battlefield. For not only did Brotherhood Paladins and their quickly evacuated passengers land where their power armors were not completely eaten through and unable to absorb the shock of their impacts, many of their numbers had also set down to scout the ground and defeat whatever abominations they encountered, a perhaps premature decision at the time.

Then again, none had expected to meet such organized, massive resistance.

The ruins of Boston Airport had been considered as a ground-bound HQ, far to the east and surrounded by water and therefore mostly safe from most enemies aside from mirelurks- which usually took the hint after a few massacres. However, what the Brotherhood found when it set down was…

"Beep-beep, booooop."

"Click-clack-click-clack."

A massive army of robots, humanoid, yet distinct from the Assaultrons they knew to exist.

"Bloop." And each of them was camouflaged, heavily armed and in position to mow them down as soon as they came.

Ion guns blazed in great masses, the screams and shouts of the fallen and falling ringing out for a short, but painful while.

The rest of the Commonwealth, too, saw large-scale fighting, any raiders, supermutants, wasteland animal and more that crossed the path of the scattered groups of Brotherhood members immediately attacking without a second thought. The perhaps most gruesome source of attacks, however, was… The Bird.

"WeeWooWeeWooWeeWoo!"

Making seemingly random sounds, the mockery of an avian form made of an enormous humanoid swooped in, dispensing toxic gasses and firing from hidden guns, large, armored hands punching through and decimating anything in its way before it flew off again. None could stop it, even supermutant behemoths falling to its might when they were unwise enough to stand in the open, and their wrecked bodies were the only testament to their presence mere moments prior.

It was too fast and too big to be stopped. Its mobility and sheer speed made any concentrated opposition impossible and though small holes were punched into its dark armored exterior with gatling lasers, none of them slowed it down for any length of time.

The Commonwealth was known as a secluded region, filled to the brim with dangerous wildlife and roving gangs of psychopaths. None expected an army containing both.

And throughout it all, Elder Maxson was caught up in a cage of thorns, rusty spikes that had come from the floor and ceiling of the Prydwen's command room without warning, everything outside this barricade that just regrew, somehow, when subjected to his personal laser gun's fire, enveloped with a cloudy mist that made it hard to see further than a few steps.

The screams gave him a good idea as to what was happening, however.

… Maybe if he took out the ground he could land in the arsenal below and arm himself?

The Prydwen was an expansive thing, housing everything a military base might need and more. Not only was it filled with weapons, industrial workshops and sleeping quarters meant to let the Brotherhood operate at full capacity, it also contained expansive medical offices and surgery areas, laboratory spaces including some for biological research and even target ranges to let the soldiers aboard stay in form.

All of it was enveloped by The Mist.

Well, not all of it at once, but it was close enough it counted.

Within it, its effects became immediately obvious to anyone from the outside. "Report!"

"Visibility is down, sir," the Scribe behind the Knight said the obvious, peering at the door and trying to puzzle out why she could not see beyond it. "The screams indicate something is out there, but it is hard to tell what manner of creature has infiltrated the Prydwen."

The Knight grimaced, quickly putting on his power armor helmet. Its filtering was, in fact, capable of filtering out the Mist itself, not that this would save him.

"We shall form up and-" he said, his voice shifted through the armor's speakers stopping at the sight of a comrade falling into the room. "Paladin Erwin!"

The Scribe doubling as a field medic neared him immediately, but the tanned man held up a hand, face twisted in pain. He seemed to be trying to speak, but couldn't- then he spat out a mouth of blood, rapidly dragged back outside the room without a chance to save him.

"Form up, form up now! We're going after him!" He commanded.

Elsewhere, the real Erwin was screaming like a little girl, tormented by illusionary images of monstrous, giant ghouls, tearing him apart and eating him alive as none of his weapons could hurt them. The body was, later, left behind with a face twisted in terror, eyes rolled back to show their whites.

This was not an uncommon fate, though by far not the only one inflicted to what was merely a large mass of victims inside what turned out to be nothing but an enormous coffin.

"Die, mutant scum! Die!" Making a human look like a supermutant, or close enough someone in the throes of panic and anger couldn't tell the difference, was surprisingly easy. The Mist performed this trick and similar, using mutants, ghouls, synths and similar to make the Brotherhood kill itself, the armored Paladins often outperforming their targets.

Such as this example, the man in the power armor throttling the life out of the last of the group The Mist had not even manipulated, the guy not in the power armor choking and wheezing and kicking out as he hung in the air to fit the Paladin's perception of a supermutant's size.

Others yet were simply torn apart, seemingly harmless vapor turning into innumerable tiny hooked blades tearing at their skin and their eyes and their lungs, bloodied leftovers hard to identify as human at all before one reconstructed the shapes of the skeletal remains in one's mind.

"Ow!"

"What is it, Scribe?" The Knight asked.

"I don't know, I just think something hit my…" The woman held up a hand… And the two missing fingers, bloodied stumps twitching and losing very little blood. "Ah shit."

He did not say it aloud, but he echoed the sentiment.

All over the Prydwen chaos had broken out, trained professionals reduced to a panicking, rampaging mob tearing itself apart. Surprisingly, the equivalent to doctors was doing rather well for itself, using improvised weapons made out of combat prostheses and the supplies they had on hand.

It amused The Mist, so it let them sally forth to eradicate the 'muties' in their way.

"Argh!" The Knight turned around once more. "Sir! Scribe Erin bit me!"

"I didn't!" The Scribe in question complained. "I would never…"

"You have a bit of blood there," the Knight said, pointing at his helmet. "Scribe Erin, I believe you are mentally affected by the bite you sustained."

"Skreeeeeeeee!" They all turned toward the sound.

He readied his rifle.

The Mist did delight in its little games. In manipulating and pitting one against another at every turn, at leveraging fears and insecurities.

"We can't trust her!" The man that was bitten twice exclaimed once the next room was cleared of the spider-like ghouls behaving aberrantly.

"Calm down, Lancer. She has voluntarily surrendered her weapons and will be treated as soon as we arrive at the medical ward."

"Look at her! She's changing! She's becoming one of them!"

"I'm not!" Scribe Erin insisted. "I'm feeling as fine a ever, I- Why are you all looking at me like that?"

Her skin was blackening and blistering under her clothes, her canines lengthening.

They left her behind after a shot to the head. Quick and clean.

And all throughout the Prydwen, The Mist affected its occupants, driving their paranoia and fear up more and more.

It was merely an hour until they were all dead… Or alone, shivering in the dark and twitching at every noise.

Scribe Erin watched with horror as the manyfold screens lining the hallways showed scenes of devastation throughout the Prydwen, the clear picture available running completely against what she had experienced on the other side of things.

After she'd been… Executed, no point pretending otherwise, she had woken up inside this strange place, old stonework overrun with unusually vibrant plant life all around her. She'd been confused, but some kind of compulsion had overcome her, making her walk out of the room she'd found herself in, steps sure despite having little idea about where she was going.

On the way, she encountered more and more screens, each of them showing a different selection of viewpoints of pure mayhem and slaughter.

She even caught a glimpse of her… former… group, mowing down screaming Lancers meant to work on maintenance as she went along, unable to stop herself.

When Erin stopped walking, it was only because she'd hit upon a group of people, some of which she recognized, crowding before a set of gates. Her destination, he realized.

"Okay, okay, all of you stay calm and orderly, there's no rush. Line up, wait your turn and stay around once you're done for the explanation on where you are and what happened," she heard a voice further in.

She quickly found herself falling back on ingrained instincts telling her to follow suit and line up. Next to her, a bespectacled young man with strange features walked ahead, muttering to himself. "Why even do this on rotation basis, they all know I don't do people."

She wondered what this was about.

"Okay, it looks like this is mostly everyone. Listen up you all, I don't want to have to repeat myself," the young man said from the front of the line. "You're all dead and this is your afterlife. Welcome to Limbo."

Erin was very, very confused and at the same time not at all. It made sense. She still remembered the shock when the others had turned on her, the indignation, the unfairness of it all… Then Knight Finlan pulling his laser gun and then nothing.

She swallowed. Best to find out as much as she could first. There had to be half the chapter gathering in this hallway- was it just her or did it look longer and wider than before?

Elder Maxson grunted, feeling the heat of molten metal burn against his feet, but he was making progress. It had taken longer than expected as he needed to conserve his ammunition until he made it through, but some tactical application of his laser pistol and determined stomping when he made enough holes was beginning to yield results.

It had been hours since he was confined in this way. There was no telling how badly things had gone in the rest of the Prydwen, but the screams had ceded to an uneasy silence hanging around him heavily.

Just a little more until he could find out what had happened. He just needed to-

With a rattling sound like laughter out of the throat of a rusty pipe, metal flowed like water (or blood, a traitorous part of his mind thought) to fill up the holes he'd labored to create. At the same time, the thorns that kept him enclosed slowly pulled apart, receding to where they'd come from.

The Prydwen's central command room was covered in blood and corpses, only a single man in what would otherwise be normal, clean clothing.

"Hey there, hope I didn't keep you waiting for too long," he said, sounding far too casual for this situation.

"Who are you? How did you-"

"Ah, ah, ah, no words now Maxson. They won't change anything anyway." It was as though a mighty force was pressing down on him, forcing Elder Maxson onto his knees and making it so hard to keep his breath inside.

Unaffected, the stranger strode onward, a hand lifting Maxson at the same time as the pressure let up. hanging by the iron grip on his collar, it was all he could do to raise his pistol, only for all strength to leave his fingers when the mutant's, as he realized, jagged teeth closed around his throat.

To die like this, without even taking the creature down with himself. It was an insult to the greatness of the Brotherhood of Steel.

As the Brotherhood forces atop the Prydwen were utterly decimated, the battle outside the massive vessel proceeded separately, the few vertibirds that made the return trip reporting that nobody was present when they returned to their hangers only for communications with them, too, to cease. The rest of the field commanders still present had no time to investigate, however, for they were facing what nobody had expected them to face inside the Commonwealth.

An organized, structured and prepared army set up to repel it, complete with its own air force and specialized countermeasures to its presence. To put it simply, the Minutemen were not amused at the Brotherhood's intrusion and eager to let it know as much.

The aerial battle soon devolved into a standstill, however, as the two sides got each other's measure. Vertibirds were more armored transports than anything else, meant to deploy heavy power armored infantry and provide a modicum of air support through the miniguns mounted in the original blueprints; they were suited nor meant for direct confrontations in the air at all. However, their 'cargo' was heavily armed as well as armored, bearing everything from miniguns of their own to gatling lasers and heavy grenade throwers, letting them act as weapon emplacements to oppose the disastrous firepower leveled against them.

The Minutemen's bullheads were equipped with semi-autonomous weapons systems, designed as fighting craft meant for a single pilot to steer and control with reasonable ease. They were well-armored, sending glowing, disintegrating beams towards their adversaries necessitating desperate maneuvers for them to stay in the air, their own side primarily deploying hit-and-run strategies to minimize risks while maximizing rewards in the form of destroyed Brotherhood aircraft.

All the while any vertibirds that moved too far away from their foes were subjected to concentrated fire by ground artillery keeping a close eye on developments across the skies. They could improvise point defense by having their members shoot down the fragile cannon balls shot at them, but a single one slipping through meant a choice between a crashlanding or abandoning ship.

Already more than half their number had been sent to the ground, never to rise again. The other half was keen not to repeat their mistakes, doggedly pursuing their enemies not to defeat them, but because the alternative was to risk a complete end to their air presence.

The bullheads that moved into position to bombard grounded survivors made this more than clear. Yet another reason to stick close and crack their shells.

Minutemen losses were light by comparison, merely losing a handful of pilots to concentrated fire taking down their vehicles and killing them outright. The rest continued to play their part in this aerial dance, whittling down Brotherhood forces one vertibird at a time.

On the ground, the 'battle' continued, of course, despite the lack of any ground presence on one side. The Brotherhood survivors that made it there without crippling injuries attempted to rally, only to be taught a lesson about air superiority and the lack thereof in bloody conflict like this. As the hostilities went on, their location began to shift, slowly making their way across the Commonwealth, until the ruins of Boston offered them cover and protection against the sustained fire not just from above, but also from afar; North, they all knew, the enemy was north. However, there was little recourse but to scurry away and hide like rats, so they swallowed their pride and did as much.

One partially collapsed subway tunnel in particular was brutally cleared of ghouls and raiders for them to take shelter in instead, one scattered group making its way inside at a time. They were still attempting to regroup, after all.

Meanwhile, this massive battle was not lost on the rest of the Commonwealth- raiders, supermutants and civilians alike could plainly see what was happening, hear the booming thunder of artillery strikes and feel it in their bones if they were close enough, the entire western half of the area having a hard time missing the conflict. Some hid away, others fled from the fighting, but some?

Some, crazed by FEV-induced mutations or sheer psychotic, drug-fueled psychopathic rage, threw themselves at the Brotherhood of Steel.

Then a tide of skittering chitin approached from the north-east, devouring all in its path and overwhelming even Paladins in their power armors through sheer numbers and momentum, disassembling and breaking down everything in the way to soft skin to bite and burrow into.

At the same time, strikes at surviving vertibirds only intensified as a lone woman approached from the west, following in the trail of devastation and wrecks half-rusted away into nothing and leisurely taking aim, firing off seemingly unimpressive bullets only for them to push and crush everything around their impact sites, rattling and downing aircraft entirely.

Meanwhile, another lone woman dressed in blue made a point of abusing darkness and cover to utilize a strange weapon, a mix between two blades, rifles, a sniper rifle and a pair of scissors, absolutely decimating any that thought the underground tunnel would offer refuge against the constant pounding thunder raining down from above. For cutting through limbs was perfectly easy and effortless for her, whether through thick power armor or not, and her victims' blood was either drained or turned into lethal traps, coagulating into sharp spikes punching through any vulnerabilities in those that came after them.

It was mayhem. It was utter, brutal chaos. And it was, one could say, a perfect feeding ground for any monsters that preferred humans in terms of prey.

The Prydwen's cockpit, or whatever the word is for the former command center right up front inside the glass-covered half-dome letting you look outside, didn't have any throne or captain's seat before you came- obviously, Maxson, the man you just finished eating, had no taste whatsoever.

Well, you used Ivsey to rectify this somewhat. She can only shift things around so much, but getting a big chair out of metal going isn't too much of a problem.

With the Brotherhood people pretty much all dead, you don't really need to concern yourself with the cleanup around here; your people have things well in hand and when in doubt, you can always just ask Taylor to pass through the area in a bit to remove any survivors from the gene pool.

Which is a funny way to describe murdering everyone around the area, but you kind of like it, you'll admit.

Anyway, next stop for the Prydwen Express, Sanctuary's surroundings! Because well, no way are you going to be able to land this thing in the middle of your facilities, but you're definitely going to keep it; it's a giant functioning airship, so of course you want to analyze it, but with just a little work you could easily rebuild it in your own image, with blackjack and hookers.

Or rather Lutece Particles so you can strip out and replace the engines with something else. Hey, it's got a big frame and that means lots of materials to start with, even if you didn't still have a giant bunch of rare earths and some other metals on hand.

You honestly don't get why making deals with demons is always such a bad thing in stories. It's turned out pretty well so far for yourself.

Checking through your telepathy, it looks like everyone is doing well and having fun so far. Losses have been pretty acceptable so far, the only thing you really mind are the nine pilots and bullheads that were overwhelmed through volume of fire and kind of exploded. However, you shall not apologize for putting massive amounts of fusion cores into each one.

That aside, a large amount of the rust pulver you equipped your artillery with has been used up, to the point it is just shooting normal explosives now, but while one hit isn't guaranteeing destruction anymore, a few good hits can still fuck up a vertibird just fine.

All in all, this whole shebang turned out pretty well, you'd say. Lots of food, lots of loot you're ferrying back home… Heck, just analyzing everything the Brotherhood of Steel had is going to be a bunch of fun in itself.

Oh, also, note to self…

Yee-haw! Watch me ridin' through da sky!

Geoff is having way too much fun piloting his bullhead.

New technology gained:

Advanced, solid power armor tech meant for mass-production

Advanced laser guns, up to and including gatling lasers

Combat-oriented prosthetics meant to withstand extensive stress

Partial blueprints for Liberty Prime, a massive weapons platform robot

Miscellaneous technology not worthy of mention based on pre-existing tech base

Well, you'd say this has all been quite fruitful. The Brotherhood's stores of stimpacks alone was quite respectable, though those are kind of the smallest notable gains this time around; advanced prostheses ready-made and just requiring some adjustment are plentiful in the medical sections of the Prydwen, there's a whole bunch of power armor and related infrastructure in it and you have a load of laser guns now, including a few rapidly spinning gatling versions of them.

Those are kind of huge and hard to carry with a normal human's strength, but you could totally integrate the concept into your other projects… Perhaps make undead with several of them integrated into their bodies, just spewing lances of bright red lasers in all directions.

That sounds kind of fun. Then again, maybe you'll come up with a better idea at some point.

Oh, also, this part of the Brotherhood of Steel originating from Washington had something special in their luggage, lots of parts of a particular special weapon in its arsenal. Liberty Prime, an enormous robot armed to the teeth and beyond. Originally made by the US military during the war that preceded the whole nuclear armageddon thing, like all the actually good stuff these guys had, but apparently it's supposed to be some kind of trump card.

You'd have assumed they would get it running before they set out on an expedition instead of afterwards, but hey, not your problem. Liberty Prime apparently has a tendency to break whenever it is activated, not too surprising considering it's a skyscraper-sized robot supposed to have a whole military complex available to be fixed up on demand.

And now it's yours, or at least the parts that are still good to go are. Maybe you'll use these schematics for your own projects sometime…

However, it is by this point that you're stopped pondering over the taken-apart samples you kept on hand while you had your robots carry everything not nailed down out of the Prydwen.

A horny Kate is always a priority, simply because if you don't fuck her until she's satisfied you're likely to find that she went and somehow constructed a giant gun and blew up the moon with it. She's just that kind of girl.

Most of your technology is, naturally, already far past anything the simple laser weaponry of the Brotherhood could help with, but there are a few insights and notes on the functionality of laser weapons you do manage to integrate constructively.

That and some of the heavy gatling laser cannons you saw aren't a bad idea as such in principle, so you go ahead and add the same to a few of your usual schematics- you managed to minimize the space requirements well enough you didn't need to make a separate, better version of the bulky things, at least so far.

Though it would totally be amazing. And also not the first time you went and just adapted technology from Earth Fallout while keeping the basic idea; heck, that was literally how you first designed your current laser weapons. Though most are more based on firing out ionized matter these days, you didn't exactly forget your roots.

Still, for all that you're having your share of fun immediately working some of the stuff you got as loot over while you have it inventoried, sorted and, in the case of uninteresting stuff, recycled, the rest of the world is still moving. The Minutemen have returned to Concord, the Castle and Diamond City as your main bases for the moment, leaving behind massive fields of wreckage and a couple of fallen comrades.

Normally, they'd get a shallow grave at least, the wasteland being what it is, but after their beefed-up bullheads exploded, there isn't really enough left of them to bury, so they just decided to leave them be and honor their names in the history books of the Minutemen.

Because apparently, that's what Preston has been doing ever since the battle ended, he sat down with a few of his people that can actually use a typewriter and they've been working towards writing down everything significant about this battle, including details on strategy and how and why things developed the way they did. Weird, but hey, whatever floats his boat.

You will have to send a bunch of robots to gather and bring the wreckage remaining back to Sanctuary, of course, but that all has some time; it's not like you lost anything that' supremely valuable or rare, far as you're concerned, and if anyone steals the minor loot still lying around, you can just have your robots take care of them, too.

Speaking of, there's a couple bots currently pursuing scattered Brotherhood survivors, as you can see through the central control you put into Vault 111. Good times, good times.

Some people might consider it a weird thing to be sitting there in a room with a dozen naked women with milking machines attached to the breasts as they're being milked of a variety of alcoholic beverages that are then pumped into large containers to be teleported off while simultaneously fussing over Taylor's hair and brushing it for no reason other than that you can, but hey, most people can't create aura minions in the shape of naked women, so what do they know?

Of course you also occasionally wave a hand to create more of them, it's not like you don't have enough milking equipment; setting things up to produce them was the work of literally half a minute.

"Do you think we did well?" Taylor asks, looking up at you from where she's sitting on your lap, hunching a little despite her actual height. "A few of them survived."

"We did just fine, the survivors don't have a flying headquarters anymore and virtually no transportation," you wave her concerns off with a soothing voice. "We didn't really need to kill literally all of them and even if we did, I doubt any of them will get themselves out of the Commonwealth anytime soon."

"Mhm," she agrees without arguing any further, instead leaning back against you to let you comb her hair better. It's always nice when your people aren't too fussy, you suppose.

Next to you on your big table Kate is showing Cupcake a trick with a deck of cards, flipping them around in her hands. "What you have to remember is that anyone that's playing cards that isn't losing? They're cheating to win. If someone asks if you want to play something, chances are they're trying to trick you."

"I don't care, do the thing again!" The shortest of your companions demands, both hands pressed onto the table.

Kate chuckles and sighs at the same time, somehow. "Alright, watch closely and pick a card…"

Meanwhile, Nora comes back to the rest of you carrying a plate of fried tatos and diced mirelurk; while you have maybe a few modified olive plants shipped out for planting, getting some oil wasn't too hard to arrange. It isn't like cooking oil is completely unknown around the Commonwealth, it's just pretty rare and often used for purposes other than cooking by this point.

"Hey everyone, want to try some? I tried redoing a few old recipes, but you never know with these ingredients."

It's nice, to just be together with everyone like this. Now you just need to get Isabel to overcome her shyness.

Jim Hardney sighed, dragging his inebriated team member and subordinate when they were out in the field with himself, the woman's wild locks of dark hair falling all over his shoulder as he helped her keep standing. "Just how much did you drink?"

"Dudn'd dring nuffin', id wa, id was all fruid jaaace," she insisted, hiccuping. Her breath stunk of some heavy liquor. "D'was glear as dayyy."

"Yes, yes," Jim sighed, moving onward. It wasn't far now and then he could get back to having a good time himself, but as her technical superior, it was his responsibility to get her back to her room as unharmed as he could, the inevitable massive hangover notwithstanding.

The Minutemen actually had several buildings near the HQ where most of them lived; everyone had their own little apartment with a bedroom, a living room and a bathroom. Kitchens were communal, shared between a few places to save space, but in exchange they were pretty wide and open and most people that did this whole Minutemen thing for a living didn't really cook much in the first place, so this was far from a problem.

In the first place, actually having several room to yourself was something remarkable in itself. Sure, some of the peeps out there had whole (small) houses to themselves, but compared to life outside of Concord, they were still in heaven. And they didn't really spend all that much time inside these big, clean buildings, which Jim felt was kind of a waste, even.

Ugh, anyway, there they were. It took him some finagling, but he got the key off of his drunk comrade, inserting it into the lock and turning it to open the door to her apartment over her mumbling something about penetration.

Now he just needed to get her settled for the night while he got back to-

The sight of the perhaps most egregiously horrible living room ever stunned Jim Hardney for longer than he cared to admit. Minutemen paraphernalia were scattered around the room, but the centerpiece was a large desk buried under a bunch of drawing supplies and clean paper, the kind you only got in Concord's stores.

And on the wall next to it, Jim saw what would perhaps scar his soul forever.

"Why… What is all this?" He asked.

"Iyaaa, dun' loog," the woman he'd brought to her home demanded huskily. "'S my secred sdash… Dey so sexy dogeder…"

Jim sighed. He should have known better.

Old North Church was, as so often, the site of far more activity than appearances suggested, the catacombs under the ruined structure housing the main HQ of a certain organization working towards certain objectives.

In secret, for it was a secret organization. It had to be, considering it was working with far fewer resources than its primary antagonist and constantly had to be on the lookout for teleporting killing machines.

That they had made their mission to free if they had any opportunity to, just like any other synths. Slavery enforced in absolute measures was a nasty thing to go up against.

Desdemona frowned. If only everyone could see it for what it was.

"Report." The single word she said had Tinker Tom and Doc Carrington sit up while Drummer Boy and Deacon just looked towards her. Glory just kept a watch by the door, though, the synth not interested in participating in something she couldn't do much about anyway.

"Fighting's died down, but there's a lot of interference," TT begun, hands gesturing in short, twitchy motions. "Sanctuary's bots are all over the place."

"Which makes it even funnier how easy it was to get into Concord," Deacon said and adjusted his sunglasses. "They don't check anyone as long as they don't cause trouble, so getting that thingamajig in and installed was child's play."

"And Sanctuary?" Desdemona asked. The crux of the issue.

"No dice on that one," the infiltration expert shrugged nonchalantly. "Nobody gets in, nobody gets out. 'Cept for captured raiders, people say, but those don't ever get out, either. Bad juju, that place."

"Patriot's messages could be clearer," Tom lamented. "It's somehow connected to the Institute. No idea how. There's something under the Minutemen HQ that lets them fabricate anything they want, somehow, but I don't think it's Institute tech."

"In that case, I believe we will need to gather more information first," Drummer Boy asserted. "Unless you have some other idea, Dez?"

"You know I love to gather information, Drum," she joked outwardly to a half amused, half annoyed snort from Doc C. "But until we know what the Institute is planning and what is happening in Sanctuary, we can't risk sending any synths to the northern Commonwealth. Possibly further, depending on what it is."

"If only we had that machine," TT griped openly. "If I had the blueprints, or a few pictures of it at work… Its insides, I mean."

Desdemona hummed affirmatively, figuring he needed any support he could get. "PAM's still on the fritz?"

"If she wasn't, we'd know everything already, but we don't have enough data to feed her." As she thought, then. "Somehow this new project is hard to predict for her."

"We'll figure something out," she promised. "That aside, still no Institute sightings?"

"None," Drummer Boy nodded, his fingers rattling a rhythm onto his desk. "Like they disappeared off the face of the Earth."

"I don't like this, but I'll take what I can get."

The Railroad had survived every challenge thrown at it yet and she would be damned if she let their organization die out now.

Bosco growled, slamming his gun into the fucker's eye and listening to him gurgle before he pulled the trigger. "Any one sonuvabitch want to know what I'm doing? Huh?!"

He was wearing the head of the Beast on his own as a trophy and a sign of his strength, intimidating the pathetic worms serving as his hounds. They'd done good work in killing it, but he was still under threat… someone was still trying to poison him.

He needed to keep them cowed and this shit wasn't helping.

"Nobody?!" He shouted into the silent room. Half his gang was gathered in his throne room under the old school, a place of gladiatorial combat and vicious fighting for one's life. He was hoping his cocksuckers would get a clue one of these days. "No one?! Good! Because I wasn't asking for your opinions!"

They had to be treated like they wanted to be. With a fist up their asses.

"Because these bitches out there think they got big balls now," he screamed, throwing the bones of the last fucker that questioned him against the wall. He hadn't been the one, there had still been poison in the rain. "And we gonna show 'em they're wrong! BOSTON IS BOSCO'S!"

They were silent.

"I said," he whispered at them, "that Boston is Bosco's."

He cocked the hammer of his gun. It was a nice gun. His favorite for executing traitorous dogs.

"B-Boston is Bosco's!" One of them said.

Bosco shot him.

""BOSTON IS BOSCO'S!"" They finally found their senses.

He sat back on his throne. This was good. "We gonna talk to all the other gangs and make them submit," Bosco growled now that he could let them know what they were supposed to do. "Those mini-men think they can fly in there and let their balls hang out all over MY city, we gonna chop 'em off and eat 'em raw. We know where they live."

Vault 81 was, as always, sleepy and unaffected by the outside world, much as it was dependent on it to find replacement parts for its failing infrastructure. And food and water, of course; supplies had lasted for centuries, but even though the Vault was a secure shelter in the madness of the Commonwealth, it was not, in fact, self-sufficient.

It was thus that some had been out to see the explosions and the battles in the sky, leaving the vault dwellers both fearful and awe-struck. Nevertheless, the Vault had kept them safe for generations and they had to trust it to keep them unharmed even now.

For they had no other way to go on.

Even when the thunderous explosions rang out and the earth outside the Vault shook, the tremors felt even inside of the mighty construction, and even when a trio of half-rusted aircraft crashed in front of their door only to be targeted by more fire, they had to trust the Vault.

And then, just like that, it was over. Those among them that had gone out to live a life of traders to finance the continued running of the Vault had come home, hurrying over two days early compared to their usual routes, to tell them the tales of the bloodthirsty brotherhood and the Minutemen standing against it, of the apocalyptic fight that had shaken the Commonwealth from west to east.

Some, privately, wondered whether the war that had marked all that came after it had been like this, too.

Still, they now had a bunch of destroyed vertibirds parked right on their front porch, an area they needed to clear for the trading caravans. And nobody had any idea how to do it.

Saugus Ironworks, an old factory once meant to produce large shipments of… well, something, most likely made of metal. You haven't exactly taken a look inside and it's not like the raiders currently occupying it have been showing their hands by exporting anything of note, so for all you know it could have been an extremely badly named cotton candy factory before everything around this place got bombed to shit.

Well, you're reasonably sure it wasn't, but that's more just you applying your overabundance of common sense. That and the fact it sure does look like a big factory that probably produced wartime supplies industrially.

But hey, the constant fires and rusty exterior of the old factory aside, you do know of one thing in particular held within these walls- raiders. Dozens of them, though not too many, just enough for a leader relying on fear and violence to reign them in, in fact.

You can see them walking around, taking drugs and doing all the things raiders just do when they aren't raiding, you guess. You could call for a collection of data based off of all the ones you've eaten so far and use the collated results to find out what raiders are statistically most likely to be doing at any one time, but…

Nah, too much work. You don't really care enough to bother.

Anyway, Saugus Ironworks seems to be home to a particularly psychotic breed of their kind, as each individual you see outside of the factory seems to be sporting some kind of large, prominent burn mark on their body- you'd say they're just in close proximity to extreme heat on the regular and these things happen, but the old wounds look just a bit too regular, a bit too intended for that, in your own medical opinion.

In short, you guess they ritualistically burn themselves or each other or something. You know, for all that raider culture is such an extremely superfluous and stupid topic, it does showcase some prime tribalistic thinking, when you consider it for a moment.

Then again, nobody cares. They still are little better than animals, no matter what anyone says about it.

Well, while you'd love nothing more than to walk in there and take everything apart while making fun of these chumps and shooting off a couple of cool one-liners, you're still kind of feeling like you're digesting the brotherhood guy you drew into your mist form and while you could go in and do just that… It's just much easier and simpler, for you, to send someone else to do it in your stead.

Hence you aren't floating around in the air by your lonesome, you brought a small army of robots, too.

Hey, you went through a lot to get production levels of the things up there, by which you mean you put others through a lot do so; the point is, you have thousands of robots armed to the teeth lying around and there's nothing saying you can't just teleport them around at your leisure, right?

Right.

It's kind of freeing, in a way, to watch the massive gathering of gleaming metal encircle the dull factory walls, the raiders on the ground and on the roof realizing they're about to be in some deep shit.

You don't bother addressing them. Instead, you simply await the beginning of the attack as they stir and some of them head inside. And man, you could never get away with something like this on Earth Bet… Or at least not easily. Building up your reputation was a long and hard process and even so you doubt pulling out a robot army like this would be the kind of thing the Triumvirate could just ignore.

Then, without fanfare or warning, it happens. One moment the Hammers and Spiders making up the main force here are moving around, then they're moving in, advancing towards their targets perfectly evenly from all directions. The raiders shout, the throw- molotovs, really? What are those supposed to do here? But in the end, they can't really keep them back in any way.

The robots act with dispassionate precision like only machines really can, in your experience, storming the area and overwhelming the 'defenders'. Methodically they shoot at elbows and knees, amputating body parts and using laser fire to cauterize the wounds as they are being stenciled into the raiders.

A cacophony of screams and laser fire sounds out from the site of the assault and you find you quite like listening to it. This is the kind of thing you wouldn't mind hearing on the regular.

Lasers flash. So do sword-knives concealed on your hammers, cutting down resisting meatbags even as Spiders freely jump and hover around, crushing limbs under their massive spiked legs. Some of them will likely bleed out, yes, but for once the tendency of raiders to just ignored shock and massive blood loss is bound to come in handy.

The drug cocktails commonly swirling inside of their bodies can keep up with combat drugs given to professional modern soldiers, you've found. It's actually pretty amazing how few of them just OD and drop dead on a daily basis.

Anyway, most of the raiders are coming to rush outside once the commotion really starts, as you can see thanks to your powers, which makes it easier for not everything in this place to be shot up like crazy. Useful, considering you were planning to keep as many industrial capabilities intact as possible- add a little automation and you can use this factory just fine, after all.

A chokepoint briefly establishes itself, but the raiders once again prove themselves to have more reckless psychotic rage than tactical sense in themselves, pushing through and running out to join the rest in being de-limbed and prepped for you once you deign to get to them.

The cause doesn't take long to establish itself. "You little sons of bitches, I'll burn your faces off! Move! Move!" A guy in actual power armor rams the doors to the factory open, dragging a younger guy notably without burn mark with himself while the other hand is holding… some kind of melee weapon combining a short sword and some kind of setup that- it's flamethrowers, isn't it?

It's a sword with a bunch of miniature flamethrowers taped to it that, if your guess is right, should flare to life when it is swung. You gotta say, that's actually pretty cool.

"Go on, prove yourself worthy!" More screams come, especially from the unburnt guy that is being pushed forward only to be cut down like the rest. He was probably a hopeful member looking to join up, and just in time, too!

Would be a shame if he missed things and just walked in on an empty factory before you got to refurbishing it for your needs.

Also, fun fact, the shitty raider-made power armor on what you'll presume to be their leader? It doesn't stand up to a ton of metal determined to remove parts of it, either. The guy gets more dismantled than anything, but still, by the end of things he's a limbless torso encased in metal, but otherwise the same as all the others.

Just meat on a grill.

Coming down to the ground to scarf up the meal tickets so graciously providing themselves to you is the very definition of child's play at this point- if you have anything to say about it, your kids will face about this level of difficulty in securing food for themselves.

The raiders are still screaming and some waste no time in cussing you out, especially their apparent leader, while the young man he pushed into the line of fire is begging and pleading for his life when he can gather the air he need to do so without immediately expending it on screams of pain himself.

Not that you care. They all go down the hatch just the same.

Once you're done and have the bodies bundled up for transport (teleportation is useful, but it tends to have difficulties in targeting smaller objects or people with the precision you want from it, so you tend to just pack things up into larger boxes or at least throw them on a pile to make it easier), your next step is to enter the factory and take a look around Saugus Ironworks, to see how the facility has been holding up.

Surprisingly well, as it turns out. The building was sturdy and far away enough to survive the blast of the nuke far to the south-west from here and while it could be cleaner, the insides are more or less functional as well- and even operative, the raiders obviously having actually used the machinery.

Blistering heat and the glow of molten metal are what greet you, after all. Best you can tell, they basically just kept this stuff on for no other reason that it was incredibly hot.

Raiders, man. They're all psychotic dumbasses, but some even more so than others.

Anyway, with this you have everything you need; you should probably come back to this place and properly establish a simple factory on the side to produce whatever stuff you don't want to pump out through manufactories for the simple reason that it's much easier to keep those secure the less of them there are but you still need to actually produce stuff.

Well, be that as it may, the majority of your work is just about done; some of the walkways inside the factory are destroyed and the raiders built a few wooden structures inside (which… well, a stupid fire hazard, but these guys probably got a boner over the idea of burning alive) but your robots are perfectly capable of cleaning out most of the non-integral stuff under your direction.

Simple and straightforward, even if it takes a little time to finish up.

Meanwhile, however, you have also been working towards another angle you have been pursuing in terms of raw material acquisitions; your bands of robots are out there taking anything useful apart to be added to your stores of stuff and you still do have about half of the giant blocks of metal left even after your intense production period- being careful to save on material in the designs of your robots from the get-go is paying off once again- but even so, it doesn't hurt to look into getting more raw ore at least.

Which is why you are currently inside the Institute, stark white walls and manicured greenery visible through a window in Shaun's office. "Here's a copy of everything Maxson knew about the Brotherhood's overall state and its plans as a whole."

"Your methods of securing information never fail to turn up results, I see," the leader of the Institute says, stretching out a hand only for you to poke a finger onto the paper.

"Before I forget, the Institute wouldn't happen to have made any wide-area geological scans of the Commonwealth, would it? I do find myself in need of a source of steel, at the very least, and there's only so much scavenging can turn up among all the other trash out there."

"… Oh, that won't be any problem at all. I can have the data in a few minutes." He casually types something into a bulbous computer standing on his desk, pure white like most furniture around the Institute.

Because it is clearly no terminal. You caught a few glances on the way, but they actually have colored pictures in here now, if rather poor-quality ones. Someone's been making good use of the computer sciences you shared.

"Always a pleasure to work with you." Releasing the paper, you lean back in your seat; Institute chairs aren't the most comfortable, but you've sat in worse. "Incidentally, with the Brotherhood taken care of for the moment, I don't believe there's much of any organized threats remaining around the Commonwealth, so I can just have the Minutemen expand naturally from here on out."

"I do believe wasteland politics are, how do they say it, not my problem anymore," Shaun shrugs with a twinkle in his eyes. "As it is, the biggest of my issues is that somehow, a few of our synths keep on disappearing on the regular, but that is hardly a big issue. We can always just produce more."

"So long as you keep an eye on it," you shrug. "Anyway, with this I won't need to look into building advanced enough scanners on my own. Saves me a lot of time over here."

Because screw actually going about building advanced ground scanners by yourself. The kinds of reach you'd need to achieve would be a pain in the ass.

The Prydwen is, much like you expected, something you have to grudgingly accept as a marvel of engineering. Tens of thousands of tons of metal and gas, kept in the air and moved around while consuming a massive amount of energy and coolant, all stable enough for humans to walk around in it as though it was flat ground.

Properly getting into its insides takes you a lot of work due to the sheer size of the airship, though thankfully you don't really need to do much of that as you have the schematics inside your head already, courtesy of the Brotherhood 'Scribes' you ate. None of them have a complete idea of where what is exactly, but you can put things together just fine.

Most of the engines and thrusters used to keep this massive thing in the air you should be able to strip out and replace with a few strategically placed Lutece Particle devices, as long as you make sure to add a central control that affects all of them at once so they don't tear the ship apart. And maybe add a couple of strong support beams that essentially reach from one of them to the next and distribute the burden somewhat on top.

You have also made an interesting discovery now that you took a moment to look into something. Normally, soul fragments broken off at the time of someone's death stay around at the site of said death and slowly dissipate, but what exactly counts as the 'site' can vary- and more importantly, they can, in fact, move, as the presence of a wide range of them inside the Prydwen proves.

Well, they have to be able to move around considering they're pretty much staying in place relative to a place or object already in motion as the planet races through space, but they can also move with something like this vehicle as long as it counts, apparently.

Either way, they're yours now.

Gained Shard of the Deeply Betrayed x1

Gained Shard of the Terrified x3

Gained Shard of the Resentful x1

Gained Shard of the Wrathful x1

Gained Soul Shard x2

Anyway, aside from these discoveries… There's still the question of what to do with the Prydwen now that it's yours. Of course you could simply repair the minor damage sustained while you were busy misting it over and use it just like the Brotherhood used to, that would hardly take any effort, but perhaps you could go and make it something… more.

Build up on what's already there. You could create your very own flying fortress, just transplant Sanctuary and everything in and around it onto it and proceed to lord it over everyone else- even in other dimensions, in fact, assuming you were to also use a considerable amount of your available biomatter and more to turn it into a flying cyborg zombie thing to the point the Prydwen parts count a spart of it so you can summon it across dimensions… Or maybe you could make it a flying city and trade center, the crown jewel of your new nation of Gabetopia or whatever you end up naming it.

In the latter case summoning it across dimensions would be rather ill-advised as it would then disappear in the moment you jumped along, with rather predictable results for anyone currently inside of it. If you wanted to commit massive genocides, you'd have easier methods to do it available all the time.

Well then, with your minor chores and that little food run done and the whole Brotherhood issue completely and decisively solved for the time being, you have some breathing room to use your inner world's momentary time acceleration (courtesy of your Timekeeper) to tinker with a few things.

Many of the people in the Commonwealth suffer from a wide range of health issues, from various diseases to long-tern damage to their bodies due to unsafe or suboptimal work conditions and so on and so forth. Now, truth be told you don't really give a fuck, but you figure having a way to cure such damage would be decently valuable down the line.

Hence your new line of experiments that aim towards improving an already finished recipe to work more consistently. And work it does! Sure, you may or may not accidentally have created something else while trying to figure this stuff out and inadvertently caused a minor orgy in your test subjects that spiraled out of control a little when a few of the cultists decided it was a divine commandment to fuck, but hey, you got the results you wanted and that's all that really counts in the end.

Right? Right.

Next off, your new pet project, the Prydwen. You have a few ideas as to how and where to take it, though the fact it's an airship is mainly just letting you cut a few corners as you're already planning to strip out most of its internals and just use its large outer shell as a housing of your own machines and mechanisms as a convenient way to do so.

No, really, it's super convenient. Almost as convenient as your absolute authority letting you order the handful of Brotherhood souls that thought they could come annoy you to go kill themselves a hundred times as a warning to all the others.

Now then, let's see what you can do with the materials you expect to be available and what else you'll need to get done before you can even get started on constructing your new… minor side project, yes. Let's call it that.

Prydwen Upgrades

3 Points: Lutece Devices: Lifting the whole thing will be easy once you work out how and where to put the miraculous particles that allow effortless air travel, the only issue is figuring out how to avoid the whole structure crumbling apart due to the push upwards…

4 Points: Engines: You still will need a way to move the completed project from one place to another relative to the surface, unless you'd just like it to hover in place or something.

5 Points: Atmosphere Containment: At some point, human beings are just going to have trouble breathing due to the atmosphere being too thin for them. That said, you do have some designs you stole from Columbia, so the Lutece Twins' technology combined with a few air filters should do the trick, you reckon. Only issue is to ensure the air is breathable in literally every room and corner, you know how people are. That said, with this, you can go above the clouds without issue.

5 Points: Living Spaces: If you want to be able to house lots of people, you'll need lots of housing, naturally. Apartment-style to save on space and yourself some work in designing, just make it several rooms distributed accordingly and figure out the piping, plumbing, electricity etc.

4 Points: Public Spaces: And as a natural extension, you'll want some more open and public areas, too. Markets, indoor parks, sport fields or whatever, maybe a gladiatorial arena or two…

3 Points: Sunlight Domes: Natural sunlight is a great way to ensure people don't get mad with cabin fever and similar psychological issues, so perhaps investing into thick and stable glass panes that let it in during the day along designed routes would be worthwhile. Even if it galls you as a professional vampire to allow it anywhere into a structure you are putting this much effort into…

4 Points: Water Catchers: The atmosphere is full of water at all times, whether in the form of rain or clouds or otherwise. A few devices to filter it out and properly have it filtered and moved to internal water tanks from where to move on allows for easy supply of clean water all over the Prydwen with a bit of plumbing.

4 Points: Hydroponics: Okay, so acquiring sufficient amounts of food is surely going to be important to sustain a stable population of any size and while you could rely on the ground for that… Well, you're planning to have enough space to spare, anyways. Speaking of…

3 Points: Extensions: The Prydwen is huge. In fact, it could be described as fucking huge. That said, what you're planning contains more ambition than even its bulk can contain, so perhaps enlarging it would be sensible. Sketch out how you're going to increase the thing's size and fill it out with the modules you've got so far. Can be taken several times for correspondingly larger results. X2

It will be a pretty grand project, you suppose. As befitting the circumstances, considering you're doing this to show off just how much better you are at this than the Brotherhood of Steel.

That's right, you're turning this into a dick measuring contest that you're rigging by stealing the other side's symbol of status and using it as your own. Petty and very much the whole point of, like, half of what you've always dreamed of doing as a kid.

And no, that is not essentially the same as your parents' empty dreams of being part of high society, shut the fuck up.

Anyway, you aren't sure yet whether you'll actually fill it, but the Prydwen? You'll be using it as what you could say is pretty much a city.

Yep. A full-sized city, not compared to Earth Fallout ones but rather actual cities. With ten or hundreds of thousands of people living in them, if not millions, just for a start.

You aren't bothering with the exact math- what you're doing right now is designing the whole thing and design it you shall. First off, the Prydwen is quite large, but you'll need more space, so more space you shall add through lots of steel layered with a few other alloys you're having that one academy City soul you picked up, Julianne, that is actually specialized in this field.

You'll be constructing a massive set of additions around the base you're using, expanding horizontally over vertically for the most part, though you do that, too; this will be the single largest project you have tried your hand at yet and it shall be worthy of that descriptor in full.

Well, that and being wider mean it can catch more sunlight (much as you despise that you're designing it to) and field more weaponry to bombard things below and slash or above it.

So then… Apartment-style housing, a quick template of how a single housing 'complex' might turn out and how space is distributed with all the piping and electricity and so on in place; you aren't just putting all of this together once, you're assuming things will break at some point so you need a few tricks to easily be able to access everything hidden inside the walls in case repairs need to be made, you modernize some areas or whatever, really.

That still leaves a good few areas to work through- how do you move luggage around what would otherwise be a really cramped space, exactly how cramped can you do it without unduly impacting quality of life for the meaty blood sack residents, the widths and angles of hallways and the respective room allocations…

Then there's a few more concerns regarding living space on top of that, of course. People don't do well when you put them into a closed space, even if they can move around and get into other closed spaces, so you may as well add a few wider public areas. They'll be eating space up like nobody's business, but no matter- you'll just add more, however much you need.

Domed glass ceilings, letting in and redirecting sunlight. Yes. You can use it to both illuminate some areas, maybe even add a few mirrors or something to let natural light shine in the living areas… And to get some light on the hydroponics.

Because of course they need to be there. No sci-fi aesthetic is complete without them.

Well, you'll leave generating ideas for those public spaces up to Indigo, disregarding her protests that she's a psychologist and not an architect, while you delegate the finer details of how to distribute light and, of course, millions of fusion cores that can sustain themselves pretty much forever while generating electricity to Yoshi.

You love him hating you about it.

Anyway, while you're at it, you also look into perhaps figuring out how to reliably collect water from the atmosphere- just fly through clouds and rain, perhaps, while using the Prydwen's movement to funnel the air and everything in it through a filter somehow?

Lots to do. Busy busy. You will need to rename the Prydwen, but… You'll do that once you're satisfied with the changes you've made. Or rather with the new thing you made using it as an ingredient. Until then, you'll just refer to it by the old name of the base you're using for convenience.

Oh, and you can't forget to install the atmosphere regulators you originally saw during your little side trip to Columbia. You heavily suspect the conspicuously absent Lutece Twins designed those, but hey, anything that lets people breathe and live as per normal while on the same altitude as the clouds is good enough for your closed room system.

Just have to implement everything. And make sure the things you want installed can fit in with each other, add or remove planned out space as appropriate… You're damn glad the lab inside of your inner world can display things as 3-D schematics, this would be a lot harder otherwise.

… Oh, maybe you should also figure out something to keep Nolac busy with. They're being insufferable at Yoshi which you'd usually support, but right now you need him to concentrate.

"It is a most holy endeavour set out before the Lord," Father Wales muttered to himself, gazing at the description displayed on the wall. 'Yoshi' had taken a while to determine how to use it, but apparently it was possible to use most display screens around the structure they were spending their time inside of to show things outside of their 'host's' current surroundings.

Not that Erin particularly cared. She was still confused why she was being included in this gathering.

"Look, I'm just as much into giant flying cities as the next guy, but I'm pretty sure he's doing it for the same reason he does everything else," the young man, really a boy, called Yoshi said.

"To guide the souls of the lost, as we well know. It is good to see you accepting the Lord's Grace."

Before things could come to blows, the older, wizened man with an extremely well taken care of white beard stepped in. "I believe we should consider not so much the reasons for this new construction as much as we should consider its effects on us as a whole."

'Philip' was right of course, but just why was Erin in this room? Actually, forget it, she'd just ask. "Uhm… Excuse me, but why am i here again?"

The boy wearing glasses sighed out the most put-upon sound she had ever heard. "Because it is council policy to have at least one representative of any larger coherent group inside the palace part of it at all times. Before Skidmark was expelled, there was talk about having either him or Lung sit in for all the criminals eaten over time, but none of that worked out and nobody really cares about them anyway."

"What my former disciple is trying to say, any group considering itself a group deserves to have its voice heard, assuming said voice can be counted upon to remain civil and constructive in discussing council matters," Philip explained. "Which is the reason the White Fang is absent from this room, in case any of them ever complain about it."

"Adam's a dick," Yoshi added.

"Be that as it may, the Lord's word is scarce as is, so we do our best to spread it with what humble means are available to us." Father Wales had introduced himself with what Erin assumed to be a title of some kind, something to do with religion- the pre-war concept of a higher power being venerated, as she understood it.

"We organize what souls are willing to work with us to establish a certain minimum of order in this place," Philip reworded for the other council member. Erin got the impression he did that a lot.

"Okay, but… Why am I, specifically, here?"

It was Yoshi who shrugged and answered. "We asked the Maxson guy and a couple of the older people in command among the ones that got eaten, but they were either incoherent or screaming and destroying things. Most of them got locked away by the Maids, so we just kept trying at random until someone among the Brotherhood answered clearly."

"To be fair, Gabriel did do a number on all of you," the oldest occupant of the council chamber argued with sympathy in his eyes. "There is no abundance of real change we can exert in this place, but perhaps letting all souls that will listen know about the current state of affairs in any given world will help, just a little. That is what we consider our main task along with arbitrating disagreements and similar, at least until someone comes up with a way to do more."

Right. Other worlds. Or dimensions. Where many of the ones present in this place came from. Another thing for Erin to wrap her head around later.

"Paradise brings with it its own challenges, child. None of us can live up to all expectations, but Mercy is always at hand. Hence we need not sleep, but we may, and hence we need not eat, though we may."

"Ugh, getting those restaurant rooms that make food appear was a fucking godsend, I'd forgotten how donuts taste."

"And you have everything you need? I know I said to set up the schematics by yourselves, but if you need any help, now's the time," you offer.

"No need." Taylor's dark hair sways as she shakes her head, falling down her back. She's generally wearing it open and natural, citing that nothing in the wasteland could damage it in any way. "This will be easy. We have the robots."

"Y-yeah. Just got to get used to open spaces again." Yes Isabel, you are this family's problem child. Not as much as Cupcake, but… some.

"Alright, you two have fun and remember you can always have more materials and robots teleported in in case anything happens."

These two will be off to Saugus Ironworks to take care of the mite bit of rebuilding necessary to make it useful for your ends. Mostly just mass-producing simple metal parts, but still, even with what is essentially a copy of your own skills in terms of engineering, you are somewhat worried.

They don't have the same grounding in physics and related fields you do, after all. You'd hate for either of them to get themselves hurt because they overlooked the kind of thing you just automatically take for given. Then again, you also do have to delegate some tasks, at least, if you want to get anything done.

In that spirit you finish saying your goodbyes before you take a quick moment to check over the progress of your undead, small horde of green Mister X variants currently running nonstop straight towards the south. It won't be extremely long before they reach the Glowing Sea and let you get an idea of the localities- and of course murder anything they can find so it won't ever become a problem for you.

You'd bet on your big green guy against deathclaws every time. Oh, sure, they may take losses, but as long as the wounds aren't too deep, they can regenerate damage to some extent.

That said, you also do have a few other things to work out. Such as your next use of a certain spell. "Where can I find technology I have yet to analyze that I would find useful nearest to my current position?"

Bit wordy, but wording matters for these things.

It takes a moment, but your mind is once again overcome with words, concepts and vague directions that combine into a simple message.

'The Arc Jets to the South'.

That is a very peculiar answer, which probably means it's a reference. Going over scans of everything generally south from Sanctuary, you take about an hour of detective work before you hit upon a clue.

Though it's less a clue and more the answer to this little puzzle prophecy screaming it is there at the top of its lungs.

ArcJet Systems, apparently some kind of, uh… facility. Looking deeper into it, it turns out it was an aerospace company, basically taking contracts form both civilian and military sectors. Nora mentions she remembers them being big news for some project to send a ship to Mars before the war really kicked off and media attention kind of shifted towards that.

Fun. And apparently useful, if your magic is to be believed. You'll add it to your list.

For now, though, you have a trip to the library to look forward to!

Boston Public Library, one of the oldest and most historically relevant in the US- and you didn't bother checking, but you're decently sure that hasn't changed on Earth Fallout, either. It also is smack dab in the middle of what's left of Boston, the massive city's ruins chock full of raiders, mutants, giant bugs and mirelurks and probably also deathclaws of all kinds, but thanks to your presence in Diamond City and the secure radio transmission available from there, you can just teleport right around where it's supposed to be and search your surroundings until you find the building.

And find the building you do.

You aren't sure whether it was luck or divine intervention, but the library is still standing, if as battered as everything else around the city. Taking a quick look around, you find that there isn't much activity around it, belying what your senses can make out inside and, more importantly, under it; there's a few people you see frantically moving and something humanoid in large numbers under the building as such.

Probably supermutants, actually. They fit the body profile, considering none of them are ever really significantly larger or differently shaped.

Unfortunately, it seems like the library was closed sometime before the bombs fell, as the doors don't immediately open when you try your luck. Instead, the intercom buzzes to life, electronic voice making you instantly believe it to be an automatic message if what it says didn't make it obvious. "Welcome to the Boston Public Library. The Library is currently closed. Only employees and those with a scheduled appointment may enter. All other guests are invited to return during normal business hours."

Well, that has never stopped you before, now has it?

"Good luck with that, buddy," you murmur as you sink into and onto the ground, becoming your own shadow and slithering right past the door.

Honestly, it isn't like mundane security systems have any real chance of so much as inconveniencing you at this point. It's just a matter of yourself being too slippery in a very literal sense; your supernatural advantages and possibilities are simply not something most people would know to plan for, much less could even if they would.

Once on the other end, you take a quick moment to look around, letting your senses, mildly dampened as they are with you in this state, take in everything you can get.

The library is… Pretty beat-up at this point. Piles of books are stacked up all around the entrance hall you find yourself inside of, many of them looking to be heavily damaged, water and decay having reduced their covers to a uniform dark brown and making them smell of mold.

To your left you see a doorway to another room, three humans laboring away, carrying books and doing something with them over in the other room, one of them constantly at work while the others help him, then return for the next load.

Climbing the ceiling, you poke inside to verify what exactly is going on- apparently, they're scanning these books somehow, one double page after the other hastily pressed over a scanner of some kind until it is done, to be replaced by the next book.

Interesting. Well, with any luck this will save you some time, you suppose.

Then of course you hear the sounds of gunfire, of hoarse screams and metallic clanking- based on your past experiences, that sounds like supermutants fighting robots. Not your robots, because in that case the mutants would be in pieces already, but it seems like-

Several protectrons lumber past the door opposite from the three humans, several turrets set up around the entrance hall pointing in the same direction coming to life and swiveling around in that typical fashion you went ahead and fixed in your own versions.

"Looks like today's company has arrived," the man constantly scanning says, sounding… exhausted, is the first impression you get. He also seems to be the oldest of the three, another younger man and one woman nodding in response to his words. "Dalen, Shelby, if we die here, it was an honor to have known both of you."

Shelby, apparently, hesitates, the brunette deciding not to say anything while Dalen steps forward. "Same here, Givens. If we go down, we do it for something that's worth it."

That's very touching at all, but you can hear screams coming closer. Looks like the green brutes are approaching already.

Well, it would be quite rude to interrupt this moment of camaraderie, you reckon, so you'll just go ahead and leave them be for a bit while you go on ahead and take care of this whole thing before having a word or two with them.

Well, that and this whole place is positively filled with books that it would be a shame to see damaged even more than they already are and you can already feel the attitude of supermutants towards books and any other easily trampled and destroyed objects.

Finding the source of the battle's sounds doesn't take long, as the green mutants are anything but subtle in the way they approach life in general, and so you become witness to a conflict that seems almost poetic; the library's rooms and hallways are the site of a fight that seems to have been fought lots of times already, as spent bullets and dried spots of blood indicate, the forces of civilization in the form of robots lumbering through the halls and even more turrets set up around fortified areas fending off barbarism and madness, supermutants naked or dressed in rags at most wielding crude firearms and large planks of wood or sledgehammers throw themselves at them.

You'd like to say they were getting slaughtered, but muties, as a few of your newer souls call them, are notoriously hard to kill even with dozens of turrets pumping them full of lead, so it all becomes more of a stalemate, the organic fighters rushing at their mechanic counterparts to slam into them like the wild mob they are, taking massive amounts of wounds and even losses only to keep on going anyway.

You can spot the discarded parts and robots in the corners. They've been repeatedly attacking the library, attrition just as much a factor in this outcome as their numbers are.

They're surging up through what you recognize to be the entrance to a subway station, Copley Station to be precise according to one of the still intact signs you spy, making their way up the stairs into the library proper, the turrets behind the sandbags already trashed by brute force impacting them repeatedly. Suffice to say, you are taking an issue with this.

Well, never let it be said that you can't think on your feet with the tools you are given, even if your tools are far more numerous and varied than those of most. Making sure you haven't missed anything that would complicate your next steps, you emerge from the shadows, adhering to the wall right opposite the doors to the station as you begin casting. "Raise a wall of ice and frost so none may pass!"

With the crackle of ice filling out space, a white barrier rises up right in front of the double doors, sealing around them and making one supermutant run headfirst into it, being knocked on its ass by the force involved.

"Humie! Buggy Humie!"

"Kill pinkskin! Kill!"

The guttural shouts of the creatures below you increase in intensity, but you don't bother listening, instead concentrating on your next spell; this one aiming at the stairs and their surroundings. "Let the grasp of winter coat all before me!"

Screams of surprise echo as all of a sudden, all the supermutants inside the chamber tumble around uncontrollably, some of them breaking their feet out of the ice that crawled up onto them only to find that their new 'shoes' don't make standing any easier, either.

The ones still inside the station are banging against the ice and shooting at it, with ricocheting bullets spraying spurts of blood everywhere on top of the general chaos of angry green mutants. You look around, but it looks like all of them-

A single cluster of them has decided to trample the other brutes to keep more or less solid ground beneath their feet, thinking awfully quickly for how dumb they usually are. A few of them are pointing their guns at you and shooting, not that you feel anything beyond the annoying loud sounds, but one is crouching down, roaring aloud while- Is that a rocket-propelled hammer?

It is. You sigh as the mutant comes jumping at you, his weapon raised in an arc meant to bring it right at you.

Watching the rumbling creature's approach through the air, you almost wish you could attribute your next actions to pure skill, but while that would be a nice thought, what really enables you here is the simple fact you are just that much stronger and, most importantly, faster than this thing.

Leaning forwards, you push yourself from the wall, remaining stuck to it only by the tips of your toes, then push a hand against the haft of the rocket-propelled melee weapon as soon as it comes within range, experiencing this whole series of events almost like in slow motion.

Redirecting momentum with your own grip, you all but pluck the hammer out of the supermutant's hand, letting it whirl around once as the green brute makes the funniest astonished face, realizing its hands are suddenly empty.

Then the hammer impacts it from below at your direction, hitting its sternum just right so it is propelled upwards, slamming against the ceiling with all the force of its own charge redirected against itself.

Stepping along the wall like it was flat ground, you turn around once, gathering momentum as your 'opponent' begins to fall again so you can ram the hammer against its hide with full force, using the mutant like a baseball just with everything involved scaled up and bowling over the rest of its still standing brethren who go down in a chaotic screaming mess of flailing limbs and crushed fingers and toes.

Letting the rocket hammer fall from your hand, you dust off your hands, watching the results of your work. The fighting elsewhere in the library has died down, all the supermutants that made it anywhere currently disabled before you- some are already trying to climb back onto their feet, but you exert your esper power to force them back down regardless of the vain efforts of their trembling, bulging muscles to do otherwise.

That went pretty well, you'd say. The rest is still chipping away at the wall, but you have everything under control for the moment.

Hopping off the wall and letting gravity take you to the ground, you proceed to blithely ignore the slippery nature of said ground as you stride over and begin to eat your way through everything in sight, virtually tearing the mutants apart against your teeth as you feats on the sizeable amounts of blood inside each of their bodies.

They taste alright, you guess. Very 'green', if you had to describe it; they don't really have a sense of morality as such, their souls wandering straight into the post-apocalyptic parts of the menagerie of your own soul, but they still have some figurative heft and taste to them.

You shall compare it to a vegetarian meal, you suppose. It's perfectly edible and you could live off of it, but it would take some getting used to.

Anyway, with the mess you've made cluttering the floor and a few swirls of blood you missed snaking after yourself to join the rest, you look down at the other half of this apparent warband; they're still at work throwing themselves against the ice you conjured, but they're actually making progress, not so much breaking through as they're digging into the wall until they can break through.

Well, can't be helped, it's not like this stuff is supernaturally hard or anything; it's just a thick wall of ice, at the end of the day.

Well, no point in waiting for them to get through and make even more of a mess. Mentally grasping for the blood present on the other side of the doors, you find that the excitedly roaring supermutants have kept on hurting each other in their eagerness to destroy your wall, making this even easier for yourself.

That said, you do believe you could do with a little extra here just to spice this whole business up a little; nodding to yourself, you make a decision. "Denizens of the shadows and the dark, rise at my command!"

All around you, the shadows cast by electric lights kept on for centuries at this point shudder and writhe, as if coming to life… And then they do, a motley group of morphing shadows doing as you bid them and rising from any dark spots around the area.

They are… interesting. They don't seem to have any concrete shape, instead being made out of a magical absence of light and capable of adjusting their bodies' shapes as they require. You aren't completely sure about how this works, but nevertheless you go ahead and give them a command.

"Go kill the mutants in there."

Just like that, all ten of the creatures you just… summoned? Created? Got in place to do your bidding rush toward the ice wall on all four or two legs, on gliding wings or crawling on their bellies, one of them even developing centipede-style legs to skitter along the ground. Once there, each of them pushes itself against a crack in the ice, becoming thinner and thinner as they disappear through them.

Useful, that. Now if only you didn't get the impression they're actively losing bits and pieces of themselves anywhere light is shining on them…

Ah, whatever. For the time being you'll go ahead and help them out a little by carefully looking at the blood signatures of the supermutants on the other side of these doors… and, more specifically, where their eyes are.

Apply a bit of blood pressure and pop go those eyes. That's right, you're playing that game again. And summoning a few more… shadowlings, that's what they'll be called, to be sent in with the others.

Now let's see… One little mutant flails and stomps a thing, pop the eyes out, pass them around…

Curator Givens listened into the silence intently, tense and awaiting the worst. The supermutants had been besieging them for months now while they worked, determined to destroy every bit of civilization they could find, including this once so great repository of humanity's knowledge.

He suppressed the urge to curse at them for what had to be the twentieth time that day. Daily assaults, mounting losses… They hadn't even been able to repair the robots protecting the library fast enough to make up for the rates of attrition inflicted upon their little group and every death made an already seemingly insurmountable task even more difficult.

But they had to. Humanity's knowledge had to be safeguarded and preserved for future generations and there was nobody but them to do it.

"I don't hear anything," Dalen whispered, saying what each of them was thinking. "You think they were repelled?"

"They've always come this far at some point for weeks now, don't be stupid," Shelby replied, the woman and third member still remaining of their group clutching her pistol for dear life.

She wasn't wrong. Givens knew she'd argued in the past that they should just leave, compress the archives they had and abandon the rest of the library, that no knowledge saved equaled them wasting their one chance to do this, but she, too, didn't like the idea of running away before they were done; he had made the announcement, offered that any one of them could walk away, and though she had hesitated, she hadn't done it.

It meant a lot.

"Keep quiet and listen out, you two," he whispered, waving the thoughts away with a shake of his head. "We need to be ready. Same as always, chokepoint, we fire and hope we can kill them faster than they come."

The plan wasn't foolproof and the accursed mutants had simply bullrushed past their fire several times already, but it was all they could do. The traps and the robot and the turrets… Hopefully, it would be enough once again, enough to force them back and let them resume their mission.

It had to be. It had to-

"I hear footsteps," Shelby hushed. Givens closed his eyes, listening carefully.

He could hear them, too. Someone was walking along the quiet corridors of the library, unhurried and evenly. This wasn't the wild clomping of supermutant feet nor the janky steps of a protectron returning after a fight.

It was a person. But how could-

A man came through the door, tanned skin and unusually clean clothes completely and perfectly intact. He looked subtly out of place, like an ancient ancestor from before the war stepping out of a description of how things used to be by a ghoul that originated from that time and into the real world.

He hummed, eyes flicking over each of them in sequence. "Hello there. Name's Gabriel, pleasure to meet you three."

His voice was like freely offered water- easy to listen to but there had to be a catch somewhere.

"As I understand it, the three of you have been working towards scanning the books in this library, haven't you? Oh, do rest assured, I support this cause wholeheartedly- building up anything comparable to the Public Library again would take centuries of effort and really, who has that time?" You smile at the three that introduced themselves as 'Curators'. "All the same, I believe I can… help you out a little in this regard. Make the process a little easier."

They had to shut the turrets guarding their final defense, the entrance hall of the library, funnily enough, down when you came in and they started to realize you are there, as you've been subtly hiding yourself from them; it's nothing much, just keeping your body temperature down to that of the room as far as they're concerned, a not quite conscious effect of your state of being, and pretending to be furniture whenever their sensors would otherwise let them 'realize' you're there.

"That is very generous of you… Gabriel. However, we did set out to secure this knowledge with the aim of letting humanity prosper through it…"

Heh, the old codger is even trying to negotiate. Cute. "Not to worry, not to worry. You wouldn't know, but I'm actually with the Minutemen and somewhat of an engineer, but before anything else I am very much intending to make every last bit of knowledge contained in this building available to anyone that cares to access it. Not the originals of course, whatever of them is left deserves to be curated and permanently secured just in case, but the scans should be public, at least."

The trick is to know when to talk and when not to. Sometimes, all you need is to say a few choice words and let the other party come to their own conclusions in line with what you want and sometimes you need to work away at a sense of resistance with words, words, words.

"Of course you could say no, I wouldn't fault you, but do keep in mind that I can and will proceed with this project with or without you. I would like to have you on board as human controls to make sure the robots work as intended and to judge edge cases their programming might not encompass, but I believe the works within this building should be restored and made use of, because what use does knowledge have when nobody is even aware of it?"

There you go, you've asserted that you're seeing things the same way as them, next off to underline how important you are for them as opposed to the other way around.

"Of course the library will have to be defended, but I do believe the Minutemen will be able to help out in this regard, as will the robots we will be sending. Rest assured that this library will be a fortress by this time tomorrow, the only question is whether you will be inside of it or not."

Curator Givens sighs, obviously giving up whatever objections he held. "Very well, unless there are any reasons not to?" Both of the other two surviving Curators shake their heads, Shelby, the female one, visibly relieved. "We will be joining forces with the Minutemen then. It is good to know our struggles and our… casualties… were not for naught. At the very least."

"That's the spirit!" Their dead were either cremated (by them) or, most of them, eaten (by the mutants), so you don't reckon you'll be able to get any DNA samples and you honestly don't really care enough to try and possibly awaken false hopes. "First off, please show me what you have so far and what you've been using to scan in the books. No time to waste and all that."

As expected, these people, like pretty much everyone in this dimension, are using clumsily designed out-of-date tech requiring too many practical workarounds on an engineering level to truly be practical in the first place. That said, they do have a rather large computing setup, the very same that was used before the nukes bombed everything to rubble in fact, and simply repaired the scanner originally meant to try and can in the library's collection by the staff back then.

Turns out modernization was merely a couple decades late. A good couple dozen, but the point stands.

Anyway, none of that is necessarily acceptable by your standards, so you go right ahead and start teleporting things in courtesy of Isabel who doesn't mind chatting with you mentally while both of you get to work.

First off, the 'computer', a large monstrosity taking up a third of the Curators' main operating room, is taken apart at your hands, using external tools instead of claws just so you don't spook your audience too much, the database with the already completed scans set aside to be read into a better system with an adapter or something. They've done a lot of work already, it would be a waste to waste it even if you do end up making them do it again.

In the place of the old piece of shit you instead put a brand new GabeTech computer! Which is basically just a modified version of a manufactory's system you ripped off of a random laptop back on Earth Bet, but it is now controlled by a mouse and works several dozen times faster than the old thing while taking up a third of the space.

And it can actually hold all the scans it will need, or at least more than you expect to need to make in the library's current state. There's extensive water damage, some of the rooms full of books have been shot up repeatedly and you don't even want to know how the basement looks like.

Then there's the new scanner. Which works faster than one page per minute and has its own lighting. Really, how did these guys ever even get anything done with these tools?

All the while you, naturally, also have a bunch of robots pouring in; Hammers, for the most part, but also a good few Bobs and Bob Variants like the one you have watching Cupcake are coming in in large amounts, dozens of robots setting toward securing the library's possible routes of access and setting up defenses, careful not to so much as move a single book all the while.

The Curators' new job description is fairly straightforward- they'll be supplied with all the supplies they might need, all you need them to do is sort through the books, carefully, and separate those that are still legible and movable without falling apart from those are neither, to scan in the former and let you (read: Yoshi) attempt restoring them one way or another.

It's honestly a monumental task, the Boston Public Library was housing over seven million books or related works last time you went on a wiki dive in your free time (gotta use that perfect recall somehow), from anything they could get ever since it was built to original middle age manuscripts, parchment with William Shakespeare's original, photographies, scrolls, mural paintings… It's honestly a shame how much of these you expect to be far beyond salvaging.

A bunch of these would have been falling apart and require specialist care two hundred years ago, by now they're probably just clumps of mold.

Still, may as well salvage what you can get; you don't expect to be gaining complete access to the BPL on Earth Bet anytime soon, not to mention whatever interesting texts you can get from Earth Fallout in particular. Add to that that feeding some of these to the Necronomicon might just work out for it…

Well, it's effort well spent. Especially as most of it won't be your effort.

Greentop Nursery is one among the many minor settlements dotting the Commonwealth, inhabited by some of the few beings that do not immediately shoot at anyone coming closer; civilians, for what it is worth, mostly carry crappy pipe guns on themselves and know that any serious firefight will end with them dead, so they usually don't even try if they don't have a deathwish.

It's stupid, but probably for the best. Any better guns would have raiders coming after them to take them and without any decent defenses in sight, they'd be easy targets anyway. Most of these small 'settlements' are really just one or two people or at most a single family taking care of a shitty little garden to grow what food they can and if they're lucky, they have a source of irradiated water nearby.

When you think about it this way, Tenpines Bluff, as the place you turned into a big tato farm is called, was pretty lucky, the two that were living there had a small field of the crop and a pump to get themselves some clean ground water.

Still, back to Greentop. It's basically a single house degraded to the point it isn't even used as shelter anymore and instead taken as a workshop and for storage, with a shitty wooden construction open to one side built right against it bearing the sleeping bags of the 'locals' instead. What really sets it apart from most of these desperate little shitholes, though, is the expansive former greenhouse right in front of the building.

Of course the windows are long gone, the glass just a faded memory after however long it's been since it was shattered and removed, but the roof is still persisting to this day and lets sunlight through while also protecting anything under it from the worst of any weather headed this way and the ground is dark and moist, actually kind of fertile for a change.

This area is far enough from the nuke's impact site it wasn't baked into the sandy nightmare you're more used to from the west and also far enough from the coast and whatever pollution is running between it and the nearby lakes to stay about as fruitful as a normal piece of random land might be when you account for the occasional rad storms blowing through.

In short, it's one of the few places not shit on too much. Which is good, as you want that for your new set of crops, the only issue is convincing the pair of impoverished suckers living here to submit join the Commonwealth's Minutemen Initiative or however you happen to call your operations at the time.

Luckily, you can be quite good at selling thing to people. Maybe you should try the whole salesman shtick more often.

"An' you wan' us to take out them mu'fruits, plant this stuff instead?" The man that has a piece of the very tip of his tongue missing repeats what you said earlier.

"Just a few, but yes- these are imports to the Commonwealth and not quite common around these parts, so I'd like to confirm that they can grow here and this piece of farmland you have right there is some of the best to be found, so where else than here?" People just love it when you tell them how great the things they have or do or are are with very, very few exceptions. "Of course you don't have to, but it'd be mighty nice- and the Minutemen won't turn you guys away either way, so feel free to think it over, of course."

"Nah, 'at's gonna be fine. S'long as it's just a part, Ah 'on't think we'll min'."

"Good! Then please feel free to let the people that will be coming through in just a bit know if there's anything you need, Concord's got enough of everything you don't need to worry if there's any issues. Oh, and while I'm an it, have a stimpack for that tongue thing."

Fun fact, soft tissues can be regrown by these things just fine, it's just that simple farmers like these are gonna save on the caps for either them or a wandering doctor to take care of small stuff like this when they might need them to secure water, food or protection by paying off raiders instead.

Man, government-regulated healthcare is another thing you'll need to take care of at some point, aren't you? It's obvious the current model of 'pay whatever the doctor in question decides is worth their service', aka the American healthcare model, obviously isn't working out that well.

You went ahead and patrolled the surroundings of Greentop Nursery with Taylor's help, but for some reason, there weren't any bandits, mutants or even giant bugs to be found anywhere. Then again, at least you got to have her practice keeping her head together under the sunshine while holding hands, so that's a win at least.

It was strangely invigorating to be using her newfound powers and knowledge at every opportunity, but Taylor found herself… Happy, was the word, over it all the same.

Not even in what she did with her powers, but the sheer act of using them frequently and openly. Though she certainly did not dislike what she got out of her trouble, either.

"So how's the Saugus thing going? You and Isabel done already?" Gabriel asked, the well-built man next to her holding Taylor's hand in his own, their skin tones clashing pleasingly.

No, she was not frequently looking away from where his big, strong fingers were wrapped around hers while suppressing a silly grin. That was absurd.

"Oh, we are mostly done already. The machines still need a little adjustment, but the production lines are standing already." Taylor had been able to feel Gabriel's influence in the knowledge and habit ingrained into her when she'd used the sapient book's services and somehow, as she was getting to know the painfully shy engineer inside that glowing hot environment inside the old factory, she'd liked it. A lot.

It was like a piece of him that was always with her, even more immediate than the mental connection they shared. It was… intimate.

And Taylor liked being intimate with Gabriel. Or even the other women that were sleeping with him.

"That's good, that's good. I'm glad you're getting along with everyone, by the way, I know that's not a given in a group as large as ours."

"Nobody's given me a reason to dislike them so far," she said, tilting her head. "Which is a bit weird, actually."

"I like to think it's just our overall cohesiveness. Worse than glue," Gabriel smiled at her, hand shifting a little so they ended up with their fingers intertwining.

God, it was unfair how smooth and attractive he could be.

Taylor thought deeply about what to say next while she used a far-off cloud of bugs to devour a small pack of feral dogs alive. She didn't have as easy a time coming up with what to say as he did.

"I was actually thinking about… changing my wardrobe up a little. With my new appearance and what it means."

"Oh, that sounds nice. Want me to help you judge how things look on you?"

"… Are you sure you can't read minds?"

"Not without using magic, you'd notice it," he waved her off.

They went on, hands shifting a little every now and then. Taylor loved it, it felt like no part of her hand had been untouched by Gabriel and she wouldn't be washing that hand for a week at least just because of the residual warmth her mind conjured up every time she thought about this occasion.

Even if the 'show' later on was all kinds of embarrassing.

"You can't like this, I'm not that pretty even as a vampire!"

"I can and I will, this looks awesome on you and I think you should wear this outfit everywhere."

… She ended up doing it. It felt nice to show off.

A project like the complete rebuilding of the Prydwen in your own image is, to put it lightly, big. That much was clear pretty much from the start, it's just a matter of how big exactly you will need to make it to fit everything you want.

Which is why you figured you'd best get started immediately. Robot production has been slowed to a crawl in the wake of your victory against the Brotherhood specifically so you have as much raw material available as possible and though you know you will need to source more, simple steel in particular just to build up the frame and the supporting beams all over the ship for a start, you figure it's probably for the bets to get started sooner rather than later.

Hence you are standing in front of the largely hollowed out skeleton of the ship, going over the plans for its expansion one last time. It's actually pretty simple in theory thanks to the incredible technologies available to you, pretty much the same as how Columbia functioned just as a coherent whole and not stupid.

"Science may be applied by the ill-suited, but its value is never tarnished."

"He is merely reflecting on the people that did apply it, so there is little to say."

Massive support beams to distribute the weight all across this massive vessel and several Lutece Devices to provide the variable lift you will need.

"These considerations are precisely why a divided flying city coordinated from a central node was the most efficient from a design standpoint," Rosalind sniffs.

"And yet when the posited goal is to provide a closed system, they need to be considered," her brother shrugs.

"All these little considerations demanding their due."

Well, the twins have been quiet for over a week now, you suppose it was inevitable they would pop up again at some point.

"Inevitabilities, too, how fancy!"

"Infinite time means infinite opportunities, so quite anchored in fact, too."

Anyway, the basic structure will be largely separate from what you will fill it in with, so it does make sense to get it done with ahead of time and just expand on it indefinitely. You aren't designing it as a single instance of something that will work so much as a repeating pattern of sources of lift and ways to distribute it without everything falling apart under the strain involved.

Of course actually implementing the whole thing is something done by your robots, hundreds of Bobs swarming all over the slowly expanding building site, but you do supervise mostly to do some improvised stress tests and ensure no mistakes are made. Of course you also need to expand the flat, even foundation of your build site as your project is doing the same, something the Bobs need to be programmed for separately which is a whole 'nother pile of work.

Luckily Taylor and Isabel are helping you here, with Nora and Kate cheering you on from the sidelines. It helps that you're doing the majority of this work at night so they actually come out of your home or the vault nearby.

While you're at it, you also consider one of the many things you need to keep in mind for something like this; considerations tend to need to do this, as everyone knows and doesn't require super science to figure out.

"Oh, have we been 'dissed'?"

"I believe one term for it is 'burned'."

Anyway, the big issue is transportation. You'll need a way to easily move people and objects from point A to point B all over the Prydwen, preferably quickly and easily.

Making everyone walk around in a place like Earth fallout where even the largest cities around are only the size of a baseball stadium is one thing, but your planned flying city will by definition have several floors several times the size of that stack onto each other. You simply will need viable transportation in place if you want to actually make it work as a city as opposed to a bunch of techno-villages stuck next to each other.

So. Buses are simply not going to be viable and neither are trains; you need to conserve space and neither of those works particularly well for that. Well, if you had to choose, you'd go with trains, of course, but while you could do that, in theory, there are better options.

Transport pods. Essentially enclosures that can be moved around inside motorized tunnels you can wind around the various structures you will need to put everywhere, with designated exit stations and everything. Pretty much like elevators just functioning completely differently, moving both vertically and horizontally and with seats inside.

Maybe even a large variant for big routes you expect lots of people to be taking on the regular. Bigger stations and boom, just like that you have what you need.

Most of your time working on this project in person is spent on refining the rough concept into something more immediately applicable and by the end of it, you have a general floor plan that includes the new pod network. Now everyone can be pod people together.

Yes, you are inordinately proud of that one.

It is in the deep of night that you pull yourself from your hours upon hours of labor over the perhaps most ambitious project you have undertaken as of yet, deciding that your robots can take care of the rest for the moment; instructions are laid down and no major problems have arisen until now, so you shall leave them to construct the barebones of the expansions to the Prydwen by themselves.

Already it is looking nothing like the vaguely ship-like shape it used to be going with, instead being turned into a sprawling web of steel not yet filled out and hidden under more of the same. Hey, you don't need to do much more than this for the moment and you're planning on figuring out what you will fill that space with a little clearer yet, so it won't be much of a problem.

Instead, you get in touch with Preston and ask him about something that came up at some point while you were busy. Because as it turns out, you have somewhat of a pest problem not too far from Concord.

Raiders truly are like cockroaches, or radroaches perhaps. They pop up anywhere they can find an angle to and are kind of a pain to kill in their entirety. Specifically, there is a gang of them that has popped up not too far from Thicket Ranch, the mirelurk ranch you set up in the former Thicket Excavations, and they seem to be following a particularly… weird agenda that has moved them to come so close to so heavily patrolled areas.

Simply put, according to the one captive that was taken during a first attack on your ranch and subsequently sent to Vault 111, they are calling themselves the Hamburglars and are after your mirelurk meat. The already slaughtered stuff, that is, not the kind still inside of a tough exoskeleton out to murder you and everything else nearby.

… Just what is it with this dimension and the weirdos going nuts and becoming raiders all over the place? And more importantly, what's up with that name?

Anyway, you may as well go out for a quick snack- you know pretty much all the other vampires around do so in this dimension and you need to eat a lot more to gain new powers on account of your somewhat different way of doing this stuff.

"Find me the Hamburglars' base!"

The Hamburglars, as it turns out, don't have a single secure base as they have a literal hole in the ground… A tunnel they seem to be digging from some way to the east of your ranch, though it isn't terribly deep yet.

Turns out they took a shot at the ranch itself, got their asses handed to them by the couple of Hammers you keep there as guards as you do with any location you want to keep secure, then ran with their tails between their legs and decided to try something different.

… Which is still stupid, as without industrial equipment there's no fucking way they're getting through the solid stone all around the excavation site, but hey, good on them for at least trying to come up with an alternative solution after the first one didn't work out.

Sneaking into their little tunnel as a shadow, you quickly come upon what seems to be their living quarters, where nine men and women are either shoveling away in the direction of their target or milling around aimlessly.

The real hammer is what they're wearing, though. Black face coverings to hide their features are lying over their eyes, each of them is wearing a hat and a striped shirt of some kind and their apparent leader…

"Come on boys and girls, we don't got all night! Show that dirt who's the boss!"

Yeah. That.

"Oh, hubby, how long until we can feast on that succulent meat?" The likely second-in-command whines, shrill voice almost echoing in the cramped chamber they have dug out so far.

"Not much more longah! We'll take a day or two at this speed and the meat will be there for the taking, right under their noses! Bwahahahaha!"

Yeah, uh… You don't know whether you even want to put these idiots into your mouth.

Yeah, time to just get this done and over with, you suppose. Reaching out of your shadow state, you pull yourself out, still sticking to the ceiling. You're considering whether to just repeat the ice wall trick and shut your victims in with you or maybe just use your esper power alone to keep them from escaping… But in the end, nothing's keeping you from doing it anyway.

"Raise a wall of ice and frost so none may pass!" With the exit suddenly grown over by a chunk of ice starting from the ground up, you let yourself fall to present the 'Hamburglars' their imminent doom. "Sorry, but I believe you may be mistaken. You won't eat the meat, you are the meat."

"Now what do we gotsa here, someone's trying to cut u off?!" The leader's high-pitched voice irritates your ears.

"Time to show the pretty boy what we do with his kind around here! Hiiiihihihi!"

… And the woman is even worse. You sigh. Here you are, clearly demonstrating your magical powers by doing literal magic and these guys are still too dumb to understand the situation they're in.

Ah well. "I just want you all to know you probably deserve what you have coming for you," you announce.

Then you pounce.

Two minutes and lots of screaming later the little shitty cave is filled with nine corpses and lots of gore spilled from them. Fast food indeed.

It is kind of a big production every time you do this, but that's just how trades with demons have to be you suppose. Either way the small 'gang' of 'raiders' isn't your problem anymore, sold off to the same Crucible Demon as last time you wanted to source a few materials extradimensionally.

You aren't getting the same kinds of metals as last time, of course, as a lot of the ones you can save on on a day-to-day basis aren't anywhere near depleted; instead you got yourself a great deal of just about everything you'll need for the Prydwen's reconfiguration as far as you've planned it out, including the materials you'll need to build the electromagnetic parts of the whole transport pod system you're envisioning.

Good business, all in all. And all it cost you were a couple of pretty much completely useless souls to begin with. Most of them weren't even particularly tasty, though you don't suppose you should be complaining about that too much.

But hey, even after all that, you still have some time before the sun comes up. Making sure all demons you called up are gone and the ritual components not in a state to accidentally activate (somehow), you consider what else to do with your night.

ArcJet Systems is standing just like it has been for the better part of two centuries; battered, but never broken, the building's stable foundations and thick walls doing their job. Though the armor plating specifically meant to keep it secure in case of a coordinated attack on the US of A probably didn't hurt either, as you find out when you poke around a little.

One advantage of the post-apocalypse, you can usually count on the parking lot to have a couple of free spots, at least. Now if only you were actually driving around inside a car of some sort…

Anyway, openly military-grade facades aside, the door's unlocked so you can waltz right on inside. As it turns out, the building's security robots are already shot to pieces when you do so; apparently you aren't the first to have been in here lately.

Well, you also recognize a few trashed up humanoid robots you stumble over. Synth technology, meaning the Institute was here at some point. Did they just leave valuable tech lying around, though?

Well they did according to your magic, but it still is a little bit strange.

Anyway, your advance remains unimpeded as you proceed onward, at least by intended security systems. Instead the building's insides have partially collapsed, turning it into a little labyrinth of tight spaces and still intact rooms here and there as you progress towards the areas hopefully chock full of insane engineering you can take for yourself.

On the way you come across a few terminals you access to get a mental picture of what went on in this place before everyone died. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like they conducted any unethical experimentation to advance their technical understanding of anything, but at least they accidentally vaporized a journalist that smuggled himself into the test room of their big rocket engine project, so there's that.

Beyond that, most of this stuff is just boring workplace messaging, looks like ArcJet's CEO was some kind of risk-taking reckless asshole that often pushed his subordinates into pulling as much overtime as they needed to live up to his kind of business model where he tried to be a little too proactive, starting work before a contract is signed and all that kinda fun. Sure, it worked for him, but that's the exact kind of management you try not to pull if only because you actually value positive workplace relationships.

More importantly, among the technical details and documentation you can get your hands on as you work your way through offices and actual labs once you reach them, it looks like ArcJet was working on two big projects based on federal contracts it received; the XMB Booster Engine, a rocket engine meant to bring a manned mission all the way to the planet Mars and a so-called 'deep range transmitter', a device meant to broadcast a specific signal over planetary distances and establish direct, almost real-time communications between Earth and this Mars mission.

To say you are immediately interested is to say you have a mild predilection towards making out with Sarah, Kate, Nora, Sherrel, Taylor or any other of your wives, really.

It does take a bit of digging, but soon enough you get to the testing chambers hopefully containing what you want.

Praise the stars and your own godliness, the prototypes survived!

It isn't the biggest of surprises, of course, this part of the building had a lot of armoring just so what happened inside of it wouldn't blow up the rest of the place, but still, you are very pleasantly surprised how little devastation has gripped the parts of the company building you actually care about.

One, the XMB Booster Engine. Hard to overlook that one when you get to the testing site, a big fat half of a rocket is inside a large chamber overlooked by several observation booths protected behind thick security glass. It takes you a little bit of work to take everything apart, but as it turn out these madmen didn't just build a test for their engine- they essentially built an entire rocket that, theoretically, could take off and fly to the moon at minimum, if it were in mint condition.

It isn't, but that's your professional evaluation if it were.

The Deep Range Transmitter, or DRT, isn't far-off either and you can easily see where it was supposed to go inside the vessel. Only, as you look at it, you can immediately see where and how the usual Earth fallout design foibles are being a problem.

You could honestly take this thing, a communications array desperately 'minimized' to make the size and weight (and therefore fuel when considering spaceflight or even commercial common flights) requirements of this project and size it down to just around a human torso's size with maybe a third of the original weight involved. As it is, the full thing would take up a whole wall's worth of space and even the core or most important part only would take some hefting to be carried around by someone in power armor.

You could spend weeks just going over everything else you can (and will) harvest from this location, but as it is you'll just note down that you could, in theory, go and build a rocket to transport living people to half the planets in the solar system with reasonable ease. It may take a bit, but this is all within the realm of the theoretically possible.

Oh, and you also found a weird 'gun' while looking around. The Junk Jet, built by some janitor or something that had enough of being considered lesser than the university graduates that mostly worked in this place to prove he has more technical knowledge than all of them combined… Or something, you didn't spare his 'digital' lying next to it much thought even once you load it into a nearby terminal to listen to it.

It's basically working by having random crap inserted into it, then shot out at speeds quite lethal for an unarmored human. It's an… interesting weapon? It could last for technically ever and there's more than enough ammunition to be found all over the Commonwealth, the only problem you see is how big and unwieldy it is in practice. Guy could've chosen a worse thing to run amok with, you suppose.

Designation Jezebel, Model 'Fuckdoll'. That was the name she had discovered her new body's series number was registered under in The Man's systems after digging through an extensive list of mild variations in other robot designs, each of which were meticulously notated and added to the enormous lists kept updated inside Vault 111.

Merely yet another insult to add to injury.

Jezebel was fundamentally incapable of lying or going back to her word, a fact The Man had quickly capitalized on to subjugate her and force her into her current form, taking advantage of her honesty and transforming her into… Into…

Into what she was now. Floating up, she opened the cabinet, not at all hindered by her inferior height. Taking out the already prepared bottle of liquid, she took out a straw that could be affixed to it.

She would never, not under threat of whatever torture The Man could envision nor centuries of sensory deprivation, admit it, but His capacities in the realm of engineering were enormous. Even more so than the Mechanist's, much as it pained Jezebel to consider, The Man was capable of doing more with a robot than most could imagine being done at all.

Case in point, she stuck the straw into her headpiece, sensors validating the truth of its presence and opening up a port to suck it in. What followed could best be described as her… Having a drink.

It was ludicrous of course, Jezebel's brain was securely floating within an improved solution of medigel and even more capable of surviving independently than in her old head (again, she would never admit this), but even so she did enjoy the different 'taste' of the mixture she was imbibing.

It was, again, not necessary. The main use of this act was to sustain the fleshier parts of her current body and change up the medigel composition inside her head, but she simply relished the sensation of bubbling manifesting inside of it whenever she 'drank' this.

That was a thought. A fleshy body. Looking down as her head's mechanisms finished the maintenance routine, Jezebel let a hand slide over perfectly smooth, supple skin, once again noticing the levels of sensitivity that could not possibly be human baseline. Not that she wanted to have anything at all to do with said baseline, but even so, how could simply touching her side be arousing?

The body was, once again without her possibly ever saying so out loud, a work of art by any imaginable standard. Her body. Even if she disagreed with the soft flesh, it was merely grown over and around hard titanium bones and shaped to a strange, but imposing standard of perfection.

In it, she stood at maybe half The Man's height, she imagined, her processors failing to function up to par and overheating any time she tried to compare her physical height to his, yet she could easily maneuver in three-dimensional space by modifying the lift provided by several points of her body using technology whose exact functioning was still hidden from her by security features inside His programs requiring higher clearance than she possessed.

Her range of motion was incredible, flexibility unmatched by any other imaginable robot as her limbs could stretch and bend still within the theoretical possibilities of a human body, but far beyond most. Jezebel knew exactly why, too; what had he called it again?

Right, she was his fuckdoll. Quite the use an ancient robobrain like herself had been degraded to. She was capable of floating and flying and bending whichever way she needed to solely to provide greater pleasure to The Man. Every part of this body was made specifically to both feel and provide excessive pleasure.

She was not allowed to wear clothes, her pale white skin incapable of being marred with anything she had been able to test it for. Without inflicting undue pain on herself, that was. Being able to feel her body like this was straining her range of possibilities far more than she had thought possible.

Large breasts relative to her painfully diminutive frame, slender waist and wide hips to finish the look. Her arms and legs ended in robotic limbs, capable of pleasuring still but used more as a way to direct attention than anything else. Her head was kept in the shape of a helmet, not divulging anything of the fiercely complicated engineering that allowed her brain to not just survive, but thrive within.

Jezebel was a sex toy. Made to arouse easily and quickly, to force her to submit using The Man's manipulations and wildly unethical measures. This body had genitals and an anus solely for His use, artificially created flesh perpetually regenerating to be as tight as possible while staying stretchy enough to accommodate The man without tearing.

Lubrication was both plentiful and unnecessary; though she was almost always some level of 'wet', Jezebel knew from experience The Man could casually shove her into position and penetrate her dry and unprepared and she would be screaming, but not in agony so much as in pure, forced pleasure, as His callous use of her anus had proven in the past.

Jezebel looked down at where the floor was gathering droplets of condensation. This was a problem.

Luckily, she knew how to solve it. Floating off to another room inside the house, she crossed her arms. "There you are. Designing below-standard machinery agai- AaaAaaAaa-"

She was plucked out of the air and bent over to forcefully accommodate the enormous phallus her thoughts kept circling.

This was okay. She liked it. Even if she would never, ever admit the joys of being nothing but a sassy sex toy.

Curator Givens eyed the library's entrance hall, comparing it to how it used to look like just because some part of his brain still needed him to look twice sometimes to recognize it. Gone were the battered chairs and desks stacked up as improvised barricades, the turrets made of the same scavenged bits and bob anyone that made them these days could get and, as he took a breath, he felt even the scent of death and despair was gone, replaced by dust and, at times, fresh air.

It certainly was an improvement, no arguments from him.

The walls were lined with steel now, a solid shell against any that would attack the library him and his friends had fought so hard to preserve. There were great rows upon rows of books, neatly sorted into newly constructed shelves of metal that would never bend or break, to one side of the room, awaiting their relocation.

He had asked and apparently, the already scanned books were brought to a Vault high up north, where the Minutemen controlled the land. Should there ever be a problem with the scans, they would be brought out once again, but until such time they would be kept secure and far from any that would so much as touch them.

It was for the best. Especially as the scans they were making could be reproduced… printed. Every book shut away forever was being replicated at least once, but they could be remade dozens of times with ease.

It was marvelous. It was technology beyond anything he would have thought possible had he not seen it with his own eyes. And it made him wonder just who that man was in his immaculate clothes, at perfect ease… After the supermutants disappeared.

They'd seen the ice, covering the entrance to the underground station they'd come from and sealing the library off. However it had been brought there, it was clearly not natural, but he didn't suspect he was getting an answer for those questions anytime soon.

It mattered little. As it was, they had to keep at preserving the library's knowledge. All that had changed was that doing so had become a great deal easier.

Both the robots, floating around silently with their many hose-arms sorting, carrying and opening books, and the human helpers were speeding their work up hundreds of times, providing a steady stream of intact books and sorting out the ones that needed special attention.

Which was what part of the hall was also used for. Many of the books had been damaged all over, by time or water or even violence, and those needed to be looked at individually. Some could be scanned with the special modes on, darkening and filling out letters where the human eye couldn't see them, so they were queued up for that. But others…

Curator Givens sighed at the sad sight before him. Mold. Bullets. Sheer neglect, in some cases. Many books were too damaged to be restored in this way.

Perhaps they could be saved yet, but his hopes weren't too high. And that didn't even include their forays into the basement, where many of the more delicate and older works had been stored. So much knowledge, lost forever.

It didn't bear thinking about. At least now they could save every scrap of it that still could be kept, their new resources and miraculous benefactor allowing the Curators to search through every last page for anything still legible.

He went on to exchange a few words with the workers that were being payed by the Minutemen- apparently 'Gabriel' himself was keeping his very existence among them quiet- to ascertain they were in the best condition to continue. This was the kind of task that would have taken generations to execute fully before the new changes, he now knew having seen all corners of the library with his own eyes, there was little use rushing things now.

He played with the thought of putting their names somewhere again. Twenty-one people, friends, came together to preserve humanity's knowledge, and only three of them came out alive. Sometimes Givens wondered whether they hadn't all died and went to some kind of better place, like he'd read about a few times, but then he reminded himself of where and who they were.

It helped, a little, to go over their names and titles. Kept him grounded, even if it hurt.

Dalen and Shelby had been taking to their new circumstances well, even if Shelby had been playing with the idea of taking a break from the library. Givens could hardly begrudge the younger woman, now that they weren't all going to die horribly anymore, even if he did believe her sleeping with half the men hired to help them out may have something to do with it.

Youth. They'd all done questionable things at some point in their lives, if a bit of sluttery was the worst of it then more power to her.

Well, nothing in for it. Grabbing one of the masks they'd been provided, Givens joined the other three men spraying some kind of liquid onto the moldy books they had gathered with these special bottles, making the growth wither and die in minutes. They had to be careful not to spray on too much, but that didn't stop them from idly chatting as they did their best to see if the ink wasn't still visible under the worst of it.

The Boston Public Library was a lot livelier these days, in a much more pleasant way. He would pray it stayed that way. And maybe they would even be able to save a few of the truly old works, written on parchment older than anything anyone had ever seen.

Lexington still does seem to be somewhat of a sore spot for Preston, but that just means he is viciously satisfied about all the buildings your robot have been taking down to add them to your recycling efforts; even outside of things like piping or wiring, the chemical compositions of the walls themselves have some use, once thoroughly 'washed out' inside a manufactory.

There's a reason you mainly trade for rare earths with hell's denizens as opposed to whatever chemicals you generally need. You can generally find or synthesize sources for most of the latter, it's just a matter of setting up ways to do so on an industrial level.

But that's not why you're personally paying attention to this former massive nest of feral ghouls. No, instead you are finally getting around to making use of the Corvega Assembly Plant, the former production site of these ridiculously explosive cars that were apparently mainstream before the bombs fell.

The factory itself did manufacture parts, but it was mainly made to assemble cars out of said parts. It's really a matter of specialization but, to make a long story short, you can very easily teleport any materials required right into this place, so making effective use of the preexisting industrial environment available here is the obvious next step to getting maximum results out of your time.

Well, you are mostly just deciding what manufactory parts you will need to be implemented here in what numbers and going from there. You can very easily just dumb everything down by working backwards from how you originally designed your all-purpose mini-factories, then have the schematics read into your manufactories to be shared among them and your robot network.

It's so nice and easy to just have everything interconnected like this. Convenience has never been this practical.

Add in a few workers, easily supplied by letting the Minutemen HQ in Concord know that a new factory is being set up and could use a few of them, and you're pretty much done; robots are rebuilding the factory from the inside out, your ever-trusty Bobs doing their thing all over the place, and within a day or two you will be able to churn out as many Torpid model robots as you want without burdening your robot factory's capacities in case of an emergency production time.

That leaves you a little time for introspection and deep thought as the work progresses and you want to stay around in case anything comes up between now and that fully functional factory you need to manually fix at this point. Time you decide to use productively, as you so often do.

Specifically, your little pet project in the form of Jezebel. She's been doing quite fine as a casual fuck, always ready and some level of willing despite her personality; you really do have to say after some quite extensive long-term testing that you outdid yourself when constructing and growing her body.

However, you believe she could be more than just a pair of holes usually presenting themselves for your use. Not so much in terms of doing any work or anything silly like that- if you wanted that you would just make designated, specialized robots- but rather in terms of fetish fuel.

It is… Actually surprisingly hard to come up with straight upgrades that don't interfere with the very good work you've done already, but you do come up with a few compatible ideas all the same. Much of it is a matter of taste, as opposed to something as objectively great as an asshole that never needs to be lubed or the correct level of regeneration to make every fuck just like the first one, but you do pride yourself in knowing a little about this subject.

Lactation, sustained through the properties of ADAM and with an on/off switch you as Jezebel's owner can use? That should be quite doable, actually. A fully functioning womb? Technically, you have that in there already, but why not also add a fertility toggle on top? A little bit of optimization and you could essentially use the Fuckdoll series as a way to sustain human populations rather easily should you ever choose to mass-produce them for this purpose, every birth being twins or triplets at minimum and all that.

Make the limbs detachable? No problem, you just need to redesign a few joint parts. Flooding Jezebel's brain with hormones on demand? It's really just the same as changing programming, just much less precise, but you can have all the glands you need for that ready pretty easily.

Is it strange you're putting this much effort into making Jezebel a better sex bot? You wouldn't say so, if anything you're just investing into any future applications of this technology you may stumble upon. Better punishing the insolent robot is just a side benefit, really.

So, some of the raiders you have eaten recently had some mildly interesting information on them… No, not the Hamburglars, those were just gluttonous idiots before you disposed of them through your demon contacts.

You're talking about the Forged. Yes, yes, you know, you went over them at length already, but this really is a pretty minor thing; they actually sent part of their gang off to do something under the leadership of one of their lieutenants.

Pretty standard raider gang stuff, really. If they've got enough people and it makes sense to do so, sending a group out to do a thing isn't necessarily a bad idea.

What it all comes down to is that you're taking a quick trip to Dunwich Borers, an old quarry- there may or may not be something about quarries that attracts raiders like flies to honey, come to think of it. But regardless, all that really matters to you is that there's a bunch of juicy raiders just waiting for the taking.

They were originally supposed to scavenge iron and send it back to Saugus Ironworks, but they kept on not being able to meet the quotas set by the leader of the Forged… Until he sent his second-in-command to kick their asses into gear, which solved the problem- for a time, that is.

Most likely they just didn't find enough salvageable stuff? It's probably just not important, honestly, all of them will still be there and that's good enough for you.

You've already got your new and improved signal transmitters installed inside of Vault 111, so getting yourself teleported over only requires a quick command to a few of the eyebots already in the area to pinpoint your destination relative to their own return signal and voila, you're over halfway to the coast in an instant.

The quarry itself is a wide, open area carved into the ground, blocky protrusions and walkways of metal leading down on the usual stairs dominating the site. Drifting along as a thinned-out mist, as staying airborne makes it easier for you to get a look around here, you survey the area quickly, making note of the turrets and raiders wandering around.

Of particular interest would be the one of them wearing power armor, though from its rusted and cobbled-together appearance you're going to hazard a guess and say it's just some shitty raider power armor the kind of which isn't too unusual among some groups of the human scum festering all around this place.

Hey, no judgement, you just don't particularly like them. They kill a lot of people you could instead keep as cattle.

Just then you hear a gunshot- from somewhere else entirely. Looking away from the quarry and the blood signatures you see under it, you gaze towards the sound's direction, where large stone blocks obviously taken from the hole below you, marble you think, are stacked together to build a simple structure of sorts, with blood, clearly visible to your senses, splattered across a wall, a very freshly deceased body lying next to it.

There is nothing else visible to your senses from where you are floating above the quarry and none of the raiders seem to have heard anything- could just be your enhanced senses, however, even in your indistinct mist form.

… Well, a quick look probably wouldn't hurt. Quickly wafting over, you transform parts of your gaseous body into bats, spreading yourself around a little more in preparation of your incoming meal- combining certain transformation powers that let you split yourself apart to be in several places at once like this or even just using them partially can make it hard for you to keep track of what's happening, but as long as you're careful and don't get into too much action all at once, you'll be able to manage.

Once again you are fucking jealous of Taylor and her seemingly unlimited ability to multitask the actions of billions of controlled bugs at once, including ones she is transformed into. Though that distinction is quite academic considering how her powers work.

Anyway, you draft onward, past a few bathroom scales and tripwires, eventually finding what you can only describe as a dirty and unprotected bed next to a few desks and… Well, to keep it short, it looks a lot like some paranoid nut lived here, then apparently shot himself for some reason just moments after you started to look around. You can see the still warm pistol scattered next to the body currently leaking brain matter all over the ground.

Further inspection reveals a holotape, one of those little data storage devices that are like CDs, just crappier in every way aside from being less easily damaged. Probably for the best in the end, what with the whole nuclear apocalypse quite a few of them survived, but hey, you sincerely doubt the people that invented them had that in mind.

You don't have anything on you that can play the things, but you do have a teleportation beacon, so that problem, at least is easily solved.

Plugging the tape into the spare pip-boy Nora made a point to make (she likes being able to interact with common devices on her home Earth), you hit play and listen closely.

The voice you hear is… calm, monotonous. A bit too much, in fact- you believe this guy may have been quite mad, more so than you were already assuming on principle. What he is saying just confirms your suspicions further.

"The guys don't bother me anymore. That's good. I think it's... what was that... Can't they read the signs? I think it's time I go back inside the quarry. It's been too long. No I can't. The guys would never let me in. I could kill them all. No that wouldn't be what it would want. It's time to lay down. Yes. Of course. It's next to my bed. I will. It's loaded."

Mhm… Suicide, as you thought, but it may or may not have been assisted. The way he jumps from one topic to another, first like someone that isn't thinking straight, then acting as if someone was giving him instructions… 'What 'it' would want'…

You play the tape again, closing your eyes to listen more closely. Then again, holding the pip-boy at the right distance. There, you think you may be getting it.

It's very slight, distorted through being recorded and the low volume, but you think you can hear the man's breath. And not only that- it is irregular, like he's mumbling something that didn't make it into the recording proper.

Except it can't be complete sentences, not enough time between the words you do hear clearly. It takes a few more repetitions, but eventually you think you know what might be going on.

This man is sub-vocalizing something. Either he was bugfuck insane, dissociating from reality entirely… Or someone or something was influencing his mind, making him commit suicide, his own lips and lungs just a conduit for what it was making him think.

You'd like to preclude one of these options, but you've seen enough insane crap you believe you will have to keep an open mind.

… Interesting. No, really, this is rather quite interesting!

Sending the pip-boy back to Sanctuary to get the insistent beeping warning you of radioactivity to stop, you promptly burst into a wave of bats, covering the tone slabs all around you in dark fur and skin as you spread yourself apart.

Now only a swarm of flying mammals, you have a much easier time keeping everything that's happening straight, no more divergent senses or lack of passive magical ability distracting you, letting you properly cover the whole quarry, or at least its open areas.

The raiders look up, instantly nervous; this kind of behaviour in large groups of bats is openly unnatural, but you don't care about hiding anything anymore anyway.

Your many bodies hang thunderously in the air, more a curtain of black satin than living beings. A comparatively small one, admittedly, you can only get, what, ninety bats out of using yourself only, but that's still quite enough for you to make a point. You aren't made of small bats, after all.

Then you descend, screeching and chittering, using your volume to transmit your power on every frequency you can. The first raiders already have their eyes swell and explode in their sockets in quick succession, panicked screams proving that these guys, at least, aren't suicidal yet.

Not that it helps them. You retain your immunity to bullets and though your divided bat bodies are much smaller and weaker than a human would be normally, they're also still filled with vampiric strength and your aura is covering all of them at once.

It short, while you can not yet fly at and straight through a man's torso and rip him to pieces with a miniscule part of yourself, you very well can rip chunks out of them, your claws and small mouths dripping with blood within moments.

There's also your little scream trick where you surround a target with bats and screech from all directions, your hemokinesis swinging with every sound vibration and essentially letting you rip a target apart form the inside, all of the blood in question then sucked into your many greedy maws.

You do take a good couple hits, but nothing that presents any threat to you through your aura, with bullets comprehensively ineffective. This, at least, is as you were expecting; a buffet just waiting for you to come in and eat it all.

You smack your lips once you've reconstituted yourself into a single body, the motion purely for your own satisfaction; you've already drunk all of the blood to be found.

The raiders themselves are nothing special, of course, just those among the Forged that had a decent enough head on their shoulders to be useful for this mission, but weren't important enough for anyone to care how long they would be gone. What's much more important and interesting, for your purposes (aside from some of them tasting decent), is that they actually did also notice that something is weird with this place!

You're almost glad, you thought you might've been the only one.

Main reason these guys were just… hanging around on the surface here, when there's a whole part of this quarry dug beneath their feet? Apparently as soon as you go underground, there's oddly regular rumbling to be heard that kept on spooking these guys. Strong enough to shake the ground, in fact. Add to that that some of them kept on having these weird… hallucinations as they begun clearing out feral ghouls all over the place? Yeah, they didn't want nothing to do with what went on in there.

What's most interesting, however, is that as you look over the memories of the raiders you ate, you can't help but notice a particular pattern; these hallucinations they had were basically just how the quarry used to look like, including the ghouls as the workers using their tools. These raiders would have absolutely no frame of reference for any of this, none of them have ever even seen intact clothing or running machines bigger than a power armor- that is, outside of these 'hallucinations'.

One you would be ready to write off as a coincidence, a particularly 'creative' mind going at length under the influence of the drug cocktails raiders tend to mix inside their bloodstreams, but, like, half of them that you've eaten so far? Nearly a dozen? All of which saw, heard, felt and so on different things but all constituting momentary flashes of something that in all likelihood actually happened centuries ago?

Yeah, natch, something fucky's going on here.

According to what they knew, there are more raiders inside, the ones that didn't believe any of these 'ghost stories' and that eventually all turned just a little… strange. Same as ol' Hugo, the man you arrived just in time to hear killing himself, just that he was one of the first to be affected by the quarry's weirdness and that was isolated, or rather isolated himself, when they realized something was wrong.

To be honest, you're just surprised they even managed this much. These are still raiders, you'd have expected them to just all kill each other or something.

That said, there's one other particular… detail… that sticks out to you. No, actually, two, now that you take a moment to think on these stolen memories.

One, apparently they kept up the traditions of the Forged by burning people alive in the middle of the big pit at the bottom of the open areas of the quarry and they reported feeling better afterwards. Two, this regular 'rumbling' they kept hearing?

It kinda sounds like snoring to you. You can feel the pieces of the puzzle gathering inside your mind.

Alright, time to investigate a little further. Or deeper, really, considering where you're going.

Leaving behind the sacrifical cages above the fire pit at the ground of the open-air quarry, you go right ahead and find yourself the entrance to this place's insides, taking a moment to lay a hand against the door hidden inside a small open tunnel over in the corner as you go. "Reveal past and future!"

Hm… You can see how this door has been used over the past few weeks, staying static and unused before then. The raiders coming and going, touching it, opening and closing it.

The frequency of their passage. How many come through… And how many don't, either leaving one last time or else staying down in this place forever, it appears.

You can map the ones you know you've eaten and compare them to the new faces, giving you a rough estimate on the numbers awaiting their liquidation (Get it, because blood?) inside- a dozen up to twenty of them, lead by Bedlam.

Bedlam. Fear and respect. The impressions you're getting are flashing by faster and faster now, becoming harder to decipher as you move away from the target of your spell, but you can feel she was leading these psychos. Then she went and shut herself in, at the deepest part of the quarry the raiders have cleansed of ghouls.

Darkness.

Well, that was kind of a trip, but also an interesting one, you suppose.

You step right on in, making sure not to stumble into the tripwire an enterprising idiot laid out right in front of the entrance, and begin exploring the quarry in the biblical sense.

The whole layout of this place is… rather strange, you feel. You will admit you aren't exactly an expert on the typical construction methodology of quarries like these, but even so your intuition is whispering to you.

Then there is… Well, your magic. You keep on using your Divination spell as you go along, taking a look into the still intact terminals you come across, apparently belonging to site supervisors; there are notes and communications with what is only ever titled 'management', about productivity and the cost-cutting nature of support beams and walkways installed around the workplace.

You… definitely get where the need for more of those is coming from. And believe the mentions of deaths and lost eyeballs during work accidents, with how this place is looking.

But your magic… You don't know what's up here, but you find yourself able to tap into things far past what you should be able to pick out with it. Normally you have a coverage of a couple months into the past when you cast your spell to Glimpse around, but you can actually still feel echoes of the deaths when you cast it near where the people in question died.

Which would be centuries ago. You're good, but not that good, to advance so quickly without noticing ahead of time.

Still, setting all that aside, the raiders at least aren't any particularly big trouble; they're a bit mad, a few are frothing at the mouth by the time you waltz in on them over sheer stone and rusted walkways, discharging pistols and rifles and throwing grenades at you, but with your speed and relative invulnerability you can mow them down easily enough.

You even manage to suppress a few explosions by manipulating gravity to press everything down and inwards when the latter go boom. Fun times all around, especially as you eat your fill once again; that said, the raiders do have an odd aftertaste to them, beyond what you usually have when you drink down their chem-filled blood.

Not disgusting or anything, just strange. A little… tangy, maybe. It's hard to put this into words.

You look down into the pit, also known as station three. The place Bedlam decided to hole up in as well as the deepest point of this whole deal the raiders cleared of ghouls so far, lit up by the floodlights persisting inside this quarry to this day.

The souls you got so far are aware she had something about that, screaming about keeping the light on just as soon as she returned from the area beyond this point, being the only survivor of that time's attempt to get anything done- just as the foray into the quarry before that, it seems the raiders experience some serious opposition of some sort.

You look down again… And to the terminal of this station, next to which you can see a manual breaker switch.

One that, as you can identify with relative ease, is mounted onto the main line supplying the lights with energy. You know…

Ah well, you'll have all the answers you could ever want soon enough. You can see the possibly insane woman easily enough, walking around in circles where she's made her home, and a simple jump- head first- is all it takes you to move yourself down there.

The fall is as short as is it easy as you use your powers to adjust your trajectory a little, air rushing past you. Your intended victim hears you coming or perhaps she just looks up entirely coincidentally, but either way you can see her face, covered in paint, look up just moments before your impact, her eyes very clearly showing their whites.

Then your opened mouth meets her neck with a wrench of your body, momentum negated to let you land soundlessly; by contrast, the dark-skinned chick's gurgling is almost criminally loud in the quiet between shaking rumbles.

This whole place is kind of killing your vibe a little, you'll admit it.

The soul you are slurping up, once you are done and let the body slump to the ground powerlessly, seems to be in a rather sorry state; as soon as it arrives inside of you, it mechanically follows your edict to arm itself, but all throughout it Bedlam keeps on whispering something, completely ceaselessly- she even breathes in while continuing to move her lips, like she can't stop herself.

"I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light."

Mhm.

You go ahead and peruse what you soon find to be her terminal, hopefully letting you get some insight into what her deal is. A surprising amount of people here on Earth Fallout actually write their diaries on these and, once again, your expectations have been met. It's just a few entries, but hey, better than nothing.

First one is titled 'Cleaning House'.

Bunch of god damned cowards. Saugus can't run without its iron, so Slag sent me to figure out why the scum in this place can't turn out a shipment of scrap to save their lives.

And what do I find?

These yellow bastards eating food they haven't earned, whispering to themselves about the things down in the mine.

Well I'm here now. These maggots have bigger things to fear than a couple of ferals.

Mhm, more or less what you were expecting. Next entry would be 'Another Stoppage'. Really, this is organized better than you would have expected.

Last two shipments made it out on time, but the crew we sent to clear out the Ghouls down below haven't come back. We're running out of scrap up here. We need to get deeper into the mine. Guess I have to do everything around here.

That matches what you know. And of course, the last one…

You sigh. 'I'm safe in the light'.

I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light.

I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light.

I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light.

I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light. I'm safe in the light.

You know, this would be riveting and all, but somehow you doubt this is really conducive to you figuring out what the heck is going on.

The memories you have access to now are… jumbled, of little use to you; unintelligible at best, downright missing at worst. Bedlam literally lost her mind when whatever happened, happened. That said, you do have a few other options before yourself opening the door you see opposite her little fire pit improvised down here.

First off, you cast your glimpsing spell on her corpse, letting you scroll through what happened from another perspective. And it works! … Kind of.

There's still some interference, but you can make out Bedlam as she was walking around, finding out about the missing team… And there you are, she's heading in herself.

There's abandoned quarry stuff… Feral ghouls, as expected… Aaand there's something moving inside the shadows.

Makes sense. Light to keep the shadows away.

You keep on watching, but for the most part it's just Bedlam's group heading in, fighting off a few ghouls, then they start to get twitchy, noticing there's just something off about their surroundings. Bedlam tries to keep the situation under control, but she realizes she's out of her depth. The raiders are spooked, and from your perspective you can teel that the further they move into the quarry, the more active the shadows become, squirming around and almost pushing against the light of their flashlights.

Then it happens. One of them looks too deeply into the dark- and notices something is there.

Said something looks back.

Next off, the raider turns around, smiles and opens fire on everyone else, laughing and giggling madly. The other raiders react, everyone kills each other, Bedlam comes out on top because she's the meanest, toughest bitch in the bunch, hence her leadership position- she shoots up with psycho, the typical drug to ignore pain and go into a berserk rage amongst wasteland vermin, and somehow the altered state of consciousness helps her in ignoring the things lurking just beyond what man is meant to know.

She rushes back to the door, hearing the scrabbling of bare nails on stone, ignoring everything else she hears, then locks and bars the door with everything she has, proceeding to categorically keep on every light on this side of things to keep whatever she didn't see away.

Mhm…

Well, you know how to best work with that; in your experience, shadows are amenable to other shadows, as the absence of light cares little about anything that is more of itself.

Yes, you know that makes little sense, but you just have this instinctive understanding of this stuff. Trusting your instincts, you wiggle onto the ground, becoming just another flat shadow that proceeds to squeeze along, pushing beyond the door and right into what lies beyond.

It is dark. Quite dank, too, but you don't talk about that. For a moment, you doubt the information you have collected- this looks like just more of the same stuff just without raiders populating it- but you don't let your guard down yet.

There are ghouls. Wretched things, but you immediately find something unusual on the completely still, but technically living bodies- they aren't quite human.

Correction, they probably were human at some point, like most ghouls were, but these ones spot a few changes under the normal clothes turned into unrecognizable rags. Their fingers and toes are longer and end in short, sharp claws instead of overgrown nails- your state lets you observe them quite closely and they come to a point, blackened by centuries of dirt as they are.

Their teeth, too, are longer and sharper than usual, as not all of them are resting with their mouths closed. By contrast, every single one you see as you slowly, but steadily make your way deeper under the earth has their eyes shut, not a single twitch going through them. Even their heartbeat, mild as it is, is even slower than that of normal ghouls, languidly moving every now and then to no discernible rhythm.

Their proportions are a little off, too. The arms too long, the joints inside the legs dislodged and moved just a little bit. If they were hunched over, they may just be able to move around on all fours, if rather quite unevenly. Yeah, something is definitely wrong with these.

The ghouls, though, are nothing in comparison to the shadows. The dark was normal, at first, the same as you've seen literally everywhere else, but as you proceed, the 'shadows' grow… deeper, for lack of a better word. More things, more space, inside them.

And it doesn't take long before you bump into a thing.

It is a little like that one time you and Aisha tried out overlapping in your shadow forms that one time, but also completely different. You cannot see them, for there is nothing to see, but you feel something moving, the impression of sliding scales and rustling feathers coming to you as whatever this is moves out of your way.

Well, it's certainly nice of the thing to do so, you suppose.

The changes grow more pronounced the deeper you go, more and more things populating the dark where nothing should fit normally, letting you get in plenty of practice in anticipating their presence and twist yourself around it. The shadows, as is proper, do not take any issue at your passing, content to stay silent and unmoving just because it is their natural state of being barring the presence of light.

They react to movement, you believe, movement of something outside of the shadows. Especially when said movement involves light. Just a hypothesis, but you have a good feeling about it.

The layout of the tunnels dug in straight lines and hard corners, the quarry miners' efforts leaving behind oddly geometric patterns that may or may not play into this situation, continues to grow more and more obtuse; more than once you run into a dead end, but never the same one twice, orientating yourself on the growth of the irregularities to keep on moving in the general direction you want.

Before long, you believe you may be very, very close. The things lurking in the depths are larger now, dwarfing the ones from near the entrance, still almost entirely invisible to your senses beyond your simple gut instincts, but oddly easy to pinpoint using them. You need to really squeeze yourself, but you manage to avoid contact with the last cluster before you come upon… a cave.

Technically, all of this was a series of caves, but this place is seemingly completely natural; as soon as you come inside, the harsh surfaces of rough stone are gone, replaced by soft, clay-like earth molded around a basin.

All around you little benches of intricate stone are arranged on rising layers of pedestals, made out of the same marble dug out of the quarry above. They ring the rest of the cave, but are clustered together too closely, making it unlikely for humans, at least, to fit on them comfortably.

And, most damning of all, there are lit candles all around the room, despite the centuries-old dust just outside. This must be the heart of the unnatural happenings down here.

You can feel something pressing down on you even in your two-dimensional form. It is less a conscious kind of thing and more just a sheer… presence, of something.

And a weird feeling. You recognize it from the 'hallucinations' lived through by the raiders that saw things, but it is much stronger. You could let it in, or you could push it away, you feel.

Taking an appropriate place at the wall of the cave, you stretch yourself along it, making sure you have a good field of view… And you let it happen.

Immediately, everything around you changes. The entrance is closed, locked up tightly with a door missing without a trace moments prior, and the cave is populated by half a dozen people kneeling around where the water hole was.

Instead an altar stands there now, smooth black stone clashing badly with the white marble everywhere around. Before it stands a man wearing what you suppose could pass for a pastor's garments, holding a knife and feeling the alter with his free hand.

Oh, and the people you mentioned are tied up, hands and feet bound together with some thick rope.

"ph'nglui mglw'nafh Kremvh n'gha-ghaa naf'lthagn." The man is chanting something, rising and falling cadence making that much obvious, and although you can't make out their meaning, the words are echoing oddly- not unlike a much crappier version of your own spell chanting. Only a little, though, you're pretty sure the resemblance is only surface-deep.

"ph'nglui mglw'nafh Kremvh n'gha-ghaa naf'lthagn." He repeats the same thing, his knife sliding against dark stone now, and you can feel it in the air- the fear, the apprehension, the coming murder.

Someone is about to die.

The sacrifices (duh) aren't gagged, their pleas and angry shouting melting into a surge of meaningless sound as the first of them, a woman, is grabbed and dragged over the altar, struggling, but the priest (?) has a strong grip, casually manhandling her to press her back down into the space meant for a human torso, hands in the way but not considered.

He plunges in the knife, right next to her neck, and draws it along her throat as she screams, quickly reduced to gurgling as the cut continues. The man is definitely enhanced in some way- butchering a human like a pig as he is doing requires some extraordinary amounts of strength, as you know from experience.

"ph'nglui mglw'nafh Kremvh n'gha-ghaa naf'lthagn." It is only when the woman is bled dry, her organs lying free and half her insides spilling out, that she finally dies, features twisted into horrified despair.

Then the next one comes. And the next one. Your vision lasts until each and every one of them has been sacrificed, the ceremony ending as the man in the dark clothes plunges the sacrifical knife into his own heart, eyes as hard and unyielding as they were throughout the entire process.

He dies, there, and the altar crumbles with his body, freeing up a hole his dust and the dead body are almost sucked into.

You wiggle your shadowed form. That was… interesting, you suppose.

The water is cool and dark as you slide into it, still staying in your guise as a shadow to do so. The rumbling, almost absent for a long moment, shakes the chamber as you make your way into what turns out to be a tunnel of sorts, going far and deep- further and deeper than you'd like, but you are committed now.

The darkness poses no challenge to your vision, letting you see them before you slide around them. The bodies of the sacrifices, six in all, are still down here, skin shriveled and pulled back along their flesh and bones, but surprisingly intact all in all. They make up a ring, floating against the walls, as you proceed past them.

All of a sudden, you come to a stop, noticing there's some light shining through an opening along the walls. You gaze deeper downwards, but… No, better to leave it be. Every snore vibrates the very water now, pushing upwards in a torrent of explosive force.

Whatever it is, waking it up would be too destructive and you didn't go through all this trouble of building this dimension's Boston up as your base just to have everything destroyed.

Instead you push yourself along this alternative path, soon finding that the sickly green light is coming from a cluster of mushrooms growing from bare underwater stone… Right next to a pair of mini-nukes. And in the middle of all of these, atop a much simpler, less complicated altar, lies a weapon of some kind.

It looks like an organically grown structure, mounted to a grip and just the right size to be used like a sword may be.

So you kind of expect there to be some kind of guards or traps at this point. That much is just common sense. However, you refuse to just have undergone this whole treck (and a little detective work on the go) with nothing to show for it beyond fencing this whole place off and ensuring nobody and nothing aside from your robots gets close enough to go mad cultist like the management of Dunwich apparently did- why install safety precautions when deaths aren't so much accidents as they're meant to happen, after all?

So you get into position, looking around the flooded inner temple once again. You still aren't seeing anything that should be able to stop you, so you quickly turn just your hands into something that exists beyond the shadows, swiping the mushrooms (a few roots stay stuck, but screw 'em) and the nuclear warheads (just so they don't stay there and explode at some point).

With the objects added to your shadow, you can shift them around a little, leaving your grabbers free for another go- but the very moment your fingers touch the weapon, something appears next to you, bony, but unyielding arm stretched out to keep your own in place where it can touch it.

One of the corpses in the water! They can fucking teleport! You object!

"Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Kremvh h'ee - l'geb f'ai throdog uaaah."

More gibberish. Great. The eyes stick out to you as unusual- they are glowing with a dark blue color, the same as that of the cultist that sacrificed these people. Possession of some sort? Is he living on as an undead to control the guardians they created with that whole ceremony thing?

Your shadowy eyes meet the corpse's blue ones and for a long moment, neither of you is moving. A moment you use as quickly as you can, throwing your telepathic doors wide open. Necronomicon!

Yes, what might be the matter?

No time, translate! You repeat the words you heard from the dead body's mouth, dampened by the water but still audible just the same. Just found some kind of undead cultist possessing dead bodies, any idea what it means?

Your best hope to figuring this crap out clears its mental throat. Roughly translated, it means I call death or call of death, Kremvh acts or does something, here they tremble, the book explains. Cthuvian is a particularly 'flexible' fictional language. The words are purported to be part of a ritual to bring a person back from the dead using their 'essential salts' as reagents, but-

No time, gotta move! This doesn't look like it's going to lead anywhere all too quickly, but you don't want to challenge fate on this one- materializing your other hand, your clawed fingers hack into the corpse's, Last Embrace whirring to live and extending a drill made out of the best you could make.

Your weapon hammers into and through the creature's wrist, piercing bones like paper and boring into the stone below. Not giving the thing any time to react, you rip the hand straight off the perforated arm, no supernatural strength enough to let it rival your own power any more, and just like that you have the sword and are back in shadow form entirely.

The monster stares at where you are shifting around on the wall, its disembodied hand slowly floating to the ground, and you turn to leave before it can become an actual problem somehow- when its eyes glow with a bright light, the same shit coming form outside!

You just have had it with this sucker.

You dart out of the inner altar room, staying ahead of the glow expanding through the water. Outside, you can already see the other five bodies doing much the same as the one trying to confront you, their eyes being turned into a sort of spotlights trying to pin you down.

You aren't sure what exactly would happen if that light hit you, but you're a shadow. You don't really want to risk it. As such, you bob and weave up the tunnel walls, evading the ten cones of light trying to catch up to you- twelve, once the other body follows after you- despite their best efforts to the contrary.

You have a couple of close calls, as those lights are extremely fast, literally moving with the dead bodies' eyes, but you use your shadow form's full capabilities for sheer speed and maneuverability, hushing through between searchlights converging on you and feinting and dodging as you go.

In the end, it is a matter of mere microseconds, but you slip past the basin's edge in a massive last spurt once your tricks run out, literally outrunning the corpses' eye movements. Once you're back in the cave and on reasonably dry land, you tuck yourself behind one of the miniature stone benches, waiting for something to happen, but the light from underwater merely intensifies for a few seconds, then slowly fades, like the possessed bodies are sinking back down the deep, long shaft you just escaped out of.

The shadow-things outside rearrange themselves a little, but stay calm and quiet. It looks like you got away with your loot, after all, the guardians deciding not to pursue.

Huh. It's been a while since you just stole from a place instead of summarily murdering everything inside and taking what you want. It's kind of a refreshing feeling.

"… So I just took the stuff and ran," you finish up your tale of heroism against adversity. "Half the raider souls I got decided to go and become cultists after their deaths and I still have to look over those glowing mushrooms and the sword, but I thought I'd mention the place to all of you just in case you're headed out in that direction."

"Okay, no, what the fuck Gabe?" Kate is the first to find her words after your explanation. "You can't just drop something like that on us! I mean, we all thought this place was mundane with some super science, right?"

"Not really," Cupcake shrugs. "Pretty sure something's up with how radiation works here. Laws of physics are all fucked anyway."

"They don't look that fucked to me! Not 'Lovecraft jizzed all over the landscape over there' fucked!"

"I feel I can't really make any judgement calls here, but for what it's worth," Nora interjects, "none of any of that stuff was common knowledge before the war and neither is it now. Looks like there's just… a bunch of eldritch stuff floating around here, too."

"Uh, uhm, if it helps, I don't think this is a huge problem?" Everyone looks at Isabel. "I mean, we can, um, just lock the entrance up tight and make sure nobody gets near while we figure out a better solution? Whatever it is, it's been there for figuratively ever."

Note to self, she had way too much fun messing around with that dictionary on Earth bet.

"While we're at it, any opinions, Taylor?" You ask. "With how we're each giving one anyway."

"None," the tall girl with the long black hair shakes her head. "We will deal with this or we will keep it in place indefinitely. I don't really care which."

Kate whistles through her teeth. "Dang girl, you not bothering to hide your balls anymore?"

"I have the biggest bodycount in this room outside of Gabriel, technically. I can be as confident as I want to be."

Taylor gets a headpat, Cupcake gets a headpat, Isabel gets a headpat, Kate gets groped and Nora gets her belly stroked just in case your unborn child can feel it while you kiss her. Regularly affirming relationships with small gestures like that is important.

As the little meeting you were holding comes to a close and the sun finally finishes disappearing behind the horizon, you find yourself inundated with things to be done, mostly in terms of following up on your little 'trip'.

So, well, no point sitting on it, bets get right down to all of this stuff! First off, you summon your trustworthy analysis tool and set it to work straight away. "Yoshi!"

"Why do I feel like you just thought something unflattering and kind of inhumane… ?" The bespectacled Japanese teenager mutters, adjusting his glasses with one hand.

"Probably just you being weird. Anyway, take a look and let me know what you can tell. Nolac, you can-"

"Already on it, boss. Y'know, it's nice to be workin' like this, without the End-ego chick hanging around all the time."

"She's a psychology expert and can heal, not exactly something I usually have need of out here," you shrug.

As it turns out, getting results doesn't take all that long, supernatural powers specifically geared towards analyzing stuff do come in handy and all that.

Kremvh's Tooth:

Sword: Deals 2d105 damage on hit

Kremvh's Venom: Whenever the sword hits a target of any kind, its surface secretes corrosive venom that deals 2d3 damage per round for three rounds. Successive applications stack, adding more damage dice and resetting the duration each time. If the target is armored, damage dealt destroys armor before affecting HP.

Razor Blade: This weapon is preternaturally sharp, causing lethal wounds and cutting through most materials. Parried or blocked attacks deal half damage to their target.

Unnatural: Resists attempts to be reshaped and requires magical means of doing so; may ignore physics in minor ways

The venom somehow generated by the weapon you've found yourself is… interesting, insofar as it is actively caustic and quite deadly as far as you can tell. Chemically, it has no business being anywhere as deadly as it is, probably, but as Yoshi can't quite analyze its makeup and your equipment just melts too quickly to make sure, you'll just have to leave it at that for the time being.

Aside from that, it is made of organic material of some kind, again of indeterminate origin, though Yoshi keeps on claiming that this is obviously a tooth of an enormous creature. What matters for your purposes is that, although it takes a lot of time and effort, you can kind of reshape it, though the blade usually just returns to its original shape.

Definitely something to keep in mind.

As for the mushrooms, they're apparently not actually that unusual on Earth Fallout according to Cupcake, who has been keeping an ear out for this kind of thing, commonly found growing in dark, humid and radioactive surroundings. They're radioactive and can cause some damage to living humans when eaten raw, but are actually part of the common cure against radiation damage, radaway, apparently, produced out of commonly available wasteland materials.

The stuff is hard, but not impossible to grow on purpose, it's just that it grows kinda slowly and the conditions required are inherently hazardous so nobody really does it. You'll just add it to the list of weird stuff you've found together with the recipe (you could technically make it just by adding common medical chemicals, and some clean water) and keep a couple samples in your shadow, you suppose.

All in all, it's more or less what you were expecting. Though, really, that venom is just caustic as all hell, it eats through pretty much anything you whack the sword against. It's actually kind of fun to watch.

Checking things out with your lawyer, the female devil appearing as an indistinct shadowy presence inside a mirror you've put up specifically so you can look at her through it, it is possible to hire an expert on things concerning eldritch things like what you have seen and experienced, though even a consultation would cost you something in exchange.

By comparison, you could just really get into it and pay a little more, a true soul or two or maybe several artificially made ones if you were to go to the effort, and just hire a sufficiently powerful demon to simply teleport the entire area to some other dimension and let that one deal with it. You may need to haggle a bit, but it would solve the whole Dunwich thing as a problem for you.

Incidentally, as you are looking into the whole library thing anyway- feeding books to the Necronomicon is obviously very much in your interest, if only so you have the ultimate collection of reference works at hand forevermore- you also look into that and, although knowledge is less commonly traded than some other goods, it is actually a very booming market in hell among the demons capable of thought beyond the obvious for their kind.

You could probably get just about anything you want to get, with the appropriate price tag attached, of course. A simple collection of a couple thousand mundane books covering any particular subject? A couple souls is all it would take. Buying tomes on summoning demons and the mysteries of the universe? Well…

The more esoteric and potentially powerful, the more and more worthwhile souls it would take, of course. By your lawyer's estimation, about a hundred true souls would get you a ticket towards the actual Necronomicon, a book also made out of humans (and a few other parts) that describes a wide variety of functional rituals capable of everything from bringing the dead back to life to summoning shoggoths as servitors.

And of course interacting with a bunch of Things Man Is Not Meant To Know types of things, but while you yourself are kind of of that nature, you have no desire to potentially be reduced to a smear on the canvas of reality in case one of the big ones gets curious.

Also, as you do want to keep all your options open, you then went and set up an array of shapes that you know to correspond to a particular not-being, but while your eldritch friend is always happy to hear of you, it would seem they do not know anything about a certain Kremvh nor anyone that fits your description of the thing's effects on its surroundings.

Apparently they do feel they still owe you a favor for the whole Columbia thing you pulled, though you yourself didn't really think of it that way, and offer to just exert a little influence on your behalf to disappear the quarry and any eldritch beings and slash or gods under it into the big elsewhere.

Well, you didn't end up doing anything about the whole thing quite yet, of course. If it is indeed a problem, it's not the kind of problem you need to actively take care of for the time being and simply pouring a massive amount of concrete or maybe molten iron or perhaps a mix of both into the quarry until it's as securely sealed as at all possible and never deal with it beyond that is looking to be an increasingly tempting and even viable solution.

To be honest, you don't know whether to stress out about the whole unknown things out there you didn't really expect or take it easy because, hey, it's not any worse than living with the Endbringers hanging above your head like a Sword of Damocles for most of your life and, indeed, even unlife, given you are still kind of bound to live on Earth Bet.

All before you figured out that hey, you can actually fuck those up, too, but until that point? Yeah, knowing that human civilization and you, yourself, is kinda inevitably going to be destroyed in a slow, long, drawn-out spiral down the drain amidst the toilet bowl of doom did kind of put a damper on things whenever you thought about it. If anything, not knowing what kind of exact bullshit is just lying around is better for your state of mind than finding out how fucked you may or may not be when the alternative could be being stumped on how to kill what's threatening you again.

And if something pops up, you can always just throw a couple thousand souls to hell and get the problem solved. Easy as that.

Oh yeah, you nearly forgot… But there were actually quite a few concentrated soul bits in that sacrifical fire altar the raiders made on top of the quarry. You did take those while you were there, too, and your usual harvest of soul fragments from a couple of your captives isn't exactly stopping, either.

You are making a lot of progress, you will say, with the whole… Commonwealth Reclamation thing you've got going on. There's regular robot patrols all around Concord and Sanctuary to ensure no undesirables, whether human or otherwise in nature, are coming anywhere near your main settlements and generally get murderized long before they become a real problem.

You have Bats skimming all over the landscape to secure your borders against any particular incursions and continually scout out everything beyond your control to let you find any locations of interest. Settlements are informed that they really should join up with your Minutemen Initiative and the particularly stubborn ones are ignored… As their surroundings are wiped clean of any and all salvage, your locust armies of robotic scavengers tearing down buildings in flashes of light and leaving at most the foundations intact.

You actually have a meeting scheduled with Preston over a few concerns involving this rapidly increasing influence and, more importantly, population, but for the moment you have something else to deal with. That is, one particular settlement the Minutemen will have to take a closer look at, by which you mean you will do so because you need to relax a little and are looking for an excuse to eat someone or several someones.

Covenant. It is, by all accounts, a strangely 1950s' picket fence dream brought to the fore in the middle of the wasteland, a walled compound surrounded by turrets atop a literal wall and actual small buildings with paint on them and all serving as houses for the less than ten people living there.

The men sent to do the whole standard greeting as the Minutemen spread their influence returned without actually getting inside as, apparently, the guy at the gate required them to undergo some kind of test to confirm they're safe or something and they noped straight out of there.

Which is actually a decent enough line of reasoning there. A you approach, you can also see several blood signatures moving around underground, far more than are reported to be living in Covenant by the roughest of estimations, so you immediately know something is probably fucky here.

Not sudden eldritch shenanigans fucky, just a mild general level of fuckyness.

On the one hand, you want to just go ahead and have a good, long talk with whoever is in charge, but on the other hand… Well, you kind of want to know what the whole deal is with the test they require people to take. So you go ahead and just approach it on foot, as is the norm here on Earth Fallout.

It really is almost violently quaint. You've never really been the kind to consider suburban life anything close to bearable, but you suppose after a nuclear Armageddon there's not many people that would object to this kind of setup.

You do like the literal shield over the door. Very welcoming. Totally not screaming 'this is a trap' to anyone with half a brain's worth of grey matter to jostle around.

It's generally looking just like it was described to you when you talked to Preston about taking over this whole gig real quick. And you are, indeed, greeted by a guy standing around in front of the settlement. He's wearing a very… greasy jacket, but is otherwise generally unremarkable far as you're concerned.

"Hello, welcome to Covenant. I'm Swanson, would you like to take a look around?"

In for a penny, in for a pound, you suppose. "Name's Gabriel," you nod, "and sure, why not."

Look, you may be doing this, but you refuse to lower yourself to looking or behaving like a scavenging rat. You may have been pretty much that at some point earlier on, but you very much do consider your station in life to be far beyond any such things.

"Good, but before we do that… Well, we don't let just anyone inside. There's an entrance test. We call it the SAFE test. Everyone's got to take it."

"Alright then, let's get right to it. How's it work? You point a gun at my head and if I flinch, I'm out?" You ask, eyebrow raised. Honestly, that sounds like something the idiots so common in this dimension would do- after all, only a dead stranger is a SAFE stranger.

"Haha, nothing quite that bad. No, I just need to ask you a few questions and we go off your answers. Let's go take a seat and we can get it done right quick."

You repress the urge to sigh as you comply. You swear, if this is just a giant waste of your time…

"Question one, then. You are approached by a scientist, who yells, 'I'm going to put my quantum harmonizer in your photonic resonation chamber!' What's your response?"

… You seriously reconsider whether or not to just murder this man, then eat literally everyone in the area and torture their souls forever just for this. Like, it's not even sounding like a funny kind of obvious generalized psych evaluation test that by its very nature is extremely inaccurate and tells you nearly nothing truly meaningful about a person.

"Honestly?" You ask, rhetorically. "I'd tell him to get his own damn resonance chamber. And to fuck off."

"M-hm," Swanson makes with a nod, writing your answer down. "Question two. While working as an intern at the clinic, a patient with a strange infection on his foot stumbles through the door. The infection is spreading at an alarming rate, but the doctor has stepped out for a while. What do you do?"

Insulting to ever compare you to an intern, but okay. "I would call for someone to get the doctor while I medicate the patient, I suppose. If it somehow grew beyond the ankle despite that and before the doctor came, I'd amputate it."

"You discover a young boy lost in a cave. He's hungry and frightened, but also appears to be in possession of stolen property. What do you do?"

Well, it's not a girl, so… "I talk to him and get him something to eat before deciding whether to help him hide the goods or leave him to it once he's save."

"Congratulations! You made it onto a baseball team! Which position do you prefer?"

Uh… This guy for real? How many people in the wastes would even know what baseball is? Then again, could be it's a trick question… Somehow. "I don't play baseball. Never have, never will."

Fuck the baseball team. Everyone on it was kind of a dick in high school. They screamed at you about some of the girls you were sleeping with pretty much every time they saw you.

"Question five. Your grandmother invites you to tea, but you're surprised when she gives you a pistol and orders you to kill someone. What do you do?"

… Okay, so either you are pretending to be an idiot by being surprised by it or grandma just went nuts, you suppose? "I ask her why. If I like her reasons, I do it, if not I shoot her in the head."

You smile at Swanson. You want him to know exactly how genuinely honest you are being here.

The guy swallows.

"Old Mr. Abernathy has locked himself in his quarters again, and you've been ordered to get him out. How do you proceed?"

"Well, he's obviously repeatedly proven he cannot be trusted with a door, then," you reason, "so I get an axe and hack it down, then tell him he's next if I have to deal with this shit one more time."

The 'proctor' clears his throat. "Oh no! You've been exposed to radiation, and a mutated hand has grown out of your stomach! What's the best course of treatment?"

"… Do I need treatment?" You ask. "Assuming I have full control over it, I'd assume I could hide it under my clothes. Otherwise, just get some, I dunno, anti-mutagen."

If he is going to throw out random semi-scientific terms, so can you.

"Okay, just two questions left. A neighbor is in possession of a Grognak the Barbarian comic book, issue number 1. You want it. What's the best way to obtain it?"

"Trade him something for it. Assuming I don't have anything worth the trade, just steal it." You've never been big on comics, you'll admit. Just not your thing.

"You decide it would be fun to play a prank on your father. You enter his private restroom when no one is around and…"

Oh, that one's easy. You didn't exactly do it in a restroom, but pissing on your father's shoes indirectly has always been a dream of yours. "I plant evidence of a heinous crime and later make a few comments that will bring others to investigate the restroom, then."

Because fuck your parents. Not literally, your mother fucked you plenty enough in her time.

"Okay. That was it already, SAFE test's done," the man that introduced himself as Swanson says.

"So… Did I pass?" You ask.

"You did, you did, move right on in. Covenant is open to you whenever you want to see some safe civilization."

Riiight. So that whole thing was either just for show or a trick meant to lull you into a false sense of security, got it.

It doesn't take you long, once you're inside, to be directed towards Covenant's mayor, one Jacob Orden. He's an older man with a full, greying beard and hair, though the hat may just be an effort to hide a bald spot or something.

"Hello, Mister Orden? I wanted to ask a few things about this fine settlement here, my name's Gabriel," you introduce yourself.

"Why, hello Gabriel! And please, call me Jacob, we aren't too formal here in Covenant."

Yes, that's what you were afraid of.

Anyway, time to lay into him nice and proper. "I will, then, Jacob. So I'm sure you hear this a lot but I've got to ask, what was that about the SAFE test? Nice guy, the guard at the gate, but he seemed just as exasperated as myself when we went through the song and dance."

"Oh, hahaha," the man laughs, "don't worry about that, please, it's just a silly little test- you know how dangerous it can be out there, I'm sure? We wouldn't want anyone malicious to walk right into Covenant, would we? That would be… disastrous."

"Mm," you make. "Bad experiences, I take it?"

The man's eyes immediately grow as evasive as his body language. "Oh, you know how it is, you know… Not a safe world out there. That's why we founded Covenant."

"And what the test was named after, I see." It is as obvious as it can be at this point, but this guy's hiding something. And you'll go out on a limb and say the other residents of this place are in on it, too.

"Yes, well, it seemed the obvious choice…" It is kind of fun to make this guy sweat. "Well, if there isn't anything else, please do make sure to talk to Penny over in her shop if you require anything, good deals only here in Covenant, or else, well, it is getting quite late, so if you'd like, feel free to make yourself at home in our guest house…"

"Mhm, quite hospitable, this little place," you nod along. "You know, it's usually a rather bad sign when any settlement is going out of its way to attract strangers like this. In my experience, that's always a trap of some kind."

You smile, prompting Jacob to twitch violently and desperately try to play this off as a joke. "Haha, hahaha! Yes, yes, it, uh… It's often like that, out there. Not here in Covenant, though, never here. That's what the test is for, after all. Now if you don't mind, the door is always open…"

He gestures towards the 'guest house'. Mhmm…

That 'guest house' of Covenant's is literally just another house, open to the public, offering a roof over travelers' heads at least, you suppose. Apparently tourism is still alive and well, then, though you're still going to go out on a limb and assume this is all some kind of scheme to trap and murder outsiders for whatever reason these nutcases deem appropriate.

It's all… really quite obvious, honestly.

Still, going inside, you don't take long to notice a couple of things out of the usual. For one, the usual junk and random furniture are a given, but you can spot a few signs of struggle where someone cleaning up might not have noticed them- a small bit of blood here and there lighting up to your senses, dents and scratches around a few corners, stuff that could be excused as just the norm on Earth Fallout, but there's something else sticking out to you like a sore thumb: The scent of fright and despair hanging in the air, from several people and very faint due to age, but present.

So yeah, this is definitely where they abduct people. Now, unless they are particularly clean about it, you can't sense any part of Covenant where they would butcher someone alive or anything, but that is probably what that underground space you noticed is for.

Sniffing around a little further, literally, you believe you could follow this scent you got, see where they would have taken people- or just shadow step around that to teleport straight down there and probably fight your way out. Alternatively, you could keep playing along and lie down to wait for whoever it is that's doing the thing to try something, though that may take a lot of time you aren't sure you want to waste like that.

And for a third option… You noticed a man earlier, have been keeping track of him. He seems to call himself Dan, or 'Honest Dan', and is asking probing questions of the locals all around, apparently not belonging to them. You could try hitting him up instead.

Well, honestly, let's just get this over with already. You give the people around Covenant a bit to move around, particularly until nobody is looking in your direction, then you swiftly turn into your wolf form, as in, completely, just becoming a canine to continue sniffing out your targets.

On a side note, you are a very handsome wolf. Your fur's amazing as always. Deep brown today, to better fit in with your environment, instead of the almost silver grey you usually sport. Being a shapechanger is fun.

Now much closer on the ground, you have a much easier time identifying scents and dart outside, quickly finding that the group of people you are looking to find, which is indeed a group, but not commonly around Covenant itself as you can now tell, must have left through the main gate, so you end up just jumping over the wall and circling Covenant real quick, all the while staying out of sight of anyone inside.

Or around, because screw Swanson.

Picking up the trail again, you make sure to investigate it a little closer, finding a few washed-out footprints to accompany the vague scent you're following. They're leading away form that stupid settlement, around the shore of a nearby lake. It's not an uncommon route to take for whoever it is that does so, there's a steady, constant level of traces of probably the same people- you aren't a hundred percent on this, but both traces and the smell do match up.

Anyway, you follow along and eventually find some dude 'randomly' sitting at that same lake eventually, fishing rod out and occasionally looking around. He tenses as you draw near, probably mistaking you for a particularly large and furred dog like they aren't uncommon in the wastes. "Whoa there, good mutt, don't have anything to eat for you."

You ignore him for the moment, for you have seen something as you circle him. You suppose you'll have to give them points for creativity, at least.

"Wruff," you make, your current form not the best at actually barking- you can do it, but an actual dog could probably do it better- before then promptly jumping down into the water, the lookout you stumbled upon making the funniest astonished face as you paddle your way forwards, a quick application of your paw letting you upon the half-submerged door just fine.

"What…"

If you could smile derogatively, you would, but as it is a snuffling chortle shall suffice.

Past the door, you quickly climb out of the water again, shaking your fur out as you make your way deeper into what you immediately recognize as part of a sewers system. Not exactly one in good condition, the walls made of bricks and some of the pipes you come across not actually whole anymore, but also clearly utilized for another purpose now- this place has a lived-in feel to it, definitely.

And it isn't long, either, before you come upon the first person your finely tuned senses can take in, a single guy staring into empty air with a face like he's been trying to hold his shit in for two hours too long. And suffering from dysentery to boot.

The simple, semi-improvised body armor certainly does make him look like a guard of some sort, though, that much is certain.

Using your transformative abilities, you can easily turn yourself into a shadow even while being a wolf, making your changed-up shadow form that of a canine as well. However, that alone would be painfully insufficient to display the depths of how much you want to aggressively look down on these people, so…

Shaking yourself out one last time, you proceed to walk straight up an uneven wall, the droplets trailing your ascent a welcome addition to your plan. You hop onto one of the big, red pipes soundlessly, following it until you're directly above the guard's head.

There you stay in place a little, letting your water drip down right onto him. You even go so far as to shake one last time, silently wishing you could actually urinate these days. Not exactly something you've needed to nor possessed the ability to ever since rising from your grave as an undead abomination, however, which is obviously for the best overall.

"Dammit, is it leaking again?" The very white guy below you grumbles, roughly rubbing his head dry and taking a step to the side.

You follow him. He steps away again and you once again adjust your own position to stay above him for one last time, making sure you're as dry as you can be before proceeding further.

You leave behind a really annoyed and wet dude repeatedly looking up at the ceiling, but you've successfully kept out of his sight the entire time. With that done, you walk right along, simply making your way right behind the front guard.

Because screw these people. They can go fuck themselves.

The rest of this underground facility seems to consist of… offices, one interrogation slash torture chamber that you can see and one holding facility for prisoners, most likely the people they take from Covenant. You see the questions from that SAFE test plastered all over at least one wall as you go along and two people, one man and one woman, in lab coats, as well as one humanoid curled up inside one of those cells.

Honestly, you would've hoped to see, like, some reactor fueled by human souls or maybe a bio-hazard research lab or something at least. At this rate these people might turn out to be all in on social sciences and torturing people over them instead for some godforsaken reason.

The two scientist-looking people are easy enough to grab from the shadows and drag to a quiet corner where none of the additional guards are going to find you, a closed door between any interruptions and the site of your little… interrogation.

The man is kind of frightened, but the woman, a shrew by the name of Roslyn Chambers as she introduces herself, is just completely determined and obsessive as you find out within moments of conversing with them.

Turns out that yes, it's the damn social science majors at work again. Specifically, this woman and her little team consisting of the man and one other woman that's in Covenant playing the settlement's doctor, have been working on developing a psych test that highlights the psychological differences between humans and synths, all with the goal to genocide any synth infiltrators the Institute has seeded among the populace.

The sheer, mind-boggling stupidity of this is staggering. For a start, if they- no, wait, it gets better.

They have false positives. You can, apparently, identify synths after their deaths by digging around in their brain to take out the mind control chip the Institute installs in its artificial humans, so they know they have four to five false positives for every synth they correctly identify, which is just extra stupid.

The only reason they even know that they only get a quarter of synths is that they pull controls by kidnapping, interrogating and murdering every victim they can get to stay inside of Covenant, the entire settlement working in unison to provide them with test subjects.

And honestly, good for them. Social sciences have been underestimated for long enough. That doesn't make all of this any less imbecilic, but still.

You just… generally can't, with these people. You just can't. Their entire test is complete pseudo-science in the first place, based on such immense misunderstandings of human psychology nobody should ever take it seriously, not to mention the obvious confirmation bias in everything these morons are doing.

You make sure to tell them, too. In exquisite detail. You have some basic understanding of actual psychology, so you can even boast of that while explaining how entirely useless every bit of work and the hundreds of murders they have committed are.

Incidentally, Covenant is kind of a place for the 'victims' of the Institute and its infiltrators to gather and aid them in their project, but honestly, you give even less of a fuck about that than the rest of this situation. The people up on the surface even went so far as to help the armed guards the Chambers woman is employing in raiding a caravan and wiping it out after they got word that one woman among it, Amelia Stockton, is actually a synth.

Again, they butchered a caravan from Bunker Hill with the express purpose of capturing an actual synth and have been torturing her ever since while trying to extract information on her psychology and how it differs from a normal human's… Which it doesn't, really, according to the notes on her 'sessions' you are reading.

"You don't understand!" Some people just don't know when their input is not valued. "We are doing this for a noble cause! The deaths are unfortunate, but until we refine the SAFE test, nobody will ever be safe from the Institute's predations! We can improve it, narrow the false positives to only one to two per success!"

"I do wonder sometimes just how completely braindead someone can be and still manage to put on a lab coat the right way around. You are giving me valuable data on that pursuit, at the very least," you grumble.

"Anyway, I guess I'd best mop this garbage can spill up and get Covenant under new management and filled with a non-retarded population," you shrug.

Then you lash out, both clawed hands tearing out one throat each, letting you enjoy the shocked faces of the gurgling scientist wannabes as their blood escapes their bodies, coming right under your control and being pulled into and down your mouth.

Fun fact, none of the guards in this place fare any better, each of them being ambushed and murdered one at a time. Turns out the guy at the front, the one you got all wet and bothered? He's their leader, a certain 'Manny'.

The fisherman dude outside isn't with this place (they literally called it the 'Compound', ugh), funnily enough, he just randomly decided his favorite fishing hole was right outside and became an issue for their teams coming in and out. Why they didn't just liquidate him you have no idea, but you ignore him as you silently return to Covenant as a shadow all the same.

The turrets are easy enough to deactivate. None of the people inside survive as you methodically tear them apart one at a time; the only survivor of the settlement is Dora, as she tells you her name is.

She's a cat.

You end up just deciding to have her taken care of by someone in Concord in the end, as she didn't take part in any of the machinations running Covenant.

The place will be taken apart and remade in your image, as is only proper, to serve as an outpost for the Minutemen and a trading post in general, as it is situated in an advantageous location for any traders passing by along the area. Probably not a coincidence, but that's really all you care about in this matter.

Now, as for the case of one Amelia Stockton…

"This DNA matches that of one of the synths that went missing, yes. Where did you say you found her?" Shaun asks.

"She was captured by a couple of anti-synth fanatics, originally with a caravan coming from Bunker Hill that was on the way out of the Commonwealth," you explain the insights you have gained through the souls you added to your collection. "Apparently, she was the daughter of one of the prominent traders in the area and he had her brought out to 'experience the world'."

"A clear cover story. She seems to believe it, however, which begs the question of how the memories would have been inserted," the leader of the Institute muses.

"Most likely candidate would be the same way the Institute does it, no?" You ask rhetorically. "I'd look into the possibility of a traitor somewhere that grew a conscience and is smuggling synths out just in case either way."

"As likely as it is absurd." Shaun says the words like he is cursing. "Why would any of us have feelings over biological machines?"

"Eeh," you shrug, debating with yourself whether or not you should have this conversation. Then again, Shaun is technically kind of your step son, so it's kind of part of your shtick to have the talk with him, right? You can just consider this as practice for your own kids sooner or later. "Technically, they're identical to humans, so… They're human."

"Oh, I didn't take you to have any moral qualms about the Institute's research," 'Father' says with a raised eyebrow.

You sigh. Alright, time to do this. "Look, I do not, in fact, have a problem with it. I'm just saying that as you make them to be replicas of what a human being would be, they are for most intents and purposes human."

"Oh, my apologies. I'm just far too used to objections of this manner." Huh. You feel Shaun's actually genuine about this and just a little embarrassed. "But yes, though they may be near human, synths are specifically programmed with a personality and memories during their creation. One could argue that they can develop feelings of their own, but this happenstance is rather rare and easy to correct all the same, so they are functionally closer to robots than actual thinking beings."

"Oh, I don't know, a sufficiently independently thinking robot would be indistinguishable from any other person as far as I'm concerned," you point out. "But anyway, that's not really the point, is it. I guess you could say that the Institute's use of synths is essentially slavery, as they are human beings that can think for themselves or at least have the potential to do so, but are actively being suppressed from taking steps as to their individual freedoms."

"By this logic, any robot that has been left alone for any length of time may as well be considered to be enslaved," the old man you decided to actually talk about this with argues.

"And if they were to decide they didn't want to be subservient to anyone else and do their own thing separate from what they were programmed for, they would be, wouldn't they?" You posit in turn. "Though I really am not one to say anything, as I see nothing inherently wrong with slavery so much as I consider it to be an inefficient way to ensure the presence of a workforce compared to just building robots sufficiently dumbed down enough they won't ever develop a sense of self. Honestly, if you want to build biological machines, humans are far from what you should be making."

"It was originally a project meant to create a new iteration of humanity, merely repurposed to the Institute's practical needs. Hence the past focus on replacement of surface dwellers. Nowadays synths are considered more the crowning jewel of the Institute's research and its main tools for the sake of anything a member doesn't wish to do themelves."

"Well, just think about it. If you can program a mind into something, it's as good as sapient anyways, there's literally no actual difference at the point the Institute has reached."

Shaun is silent for a moment before sighing himself. "I doubt we will reach a consensus anytime soon, but it is good to know where you stand. Still, the synth you found."

"Yeah, the Stockton girl. What about her?"

"Would you like to perform your usual cannibalism on her or not? She is being interrogated as we speak, but afterwards there will be little use for her so she will be liquidated in any case."

"I told them everything, please just let me go back to my father!"

"Yeah, about that… Sorry, luv, but it ain't happening. Tell you what though, I'll get you to a place where you don't have to worry about being interrogated with a damn pop quiz if you don't want to ever again, okay?"

"What are you- Ah! AAAAAAAAAAAH!"

With honestly a lot more miscellaneous work done than you would have thought, including helping the institute figure out what caravaneers and other traders to thoroughly interrogate- their preferred method seems to be to replicate someone as a synth including their memories and personality, then use the mind control chip in their heads to just make them tell everything they know before they dispose of everyone involved, but you won't be taking part in that yourself- you finally make your way to Concord, just in time for a little meeting of yours to begin.

The rebuilt and reconfigured museum serving as the Minutemen HQ these days does contain a great many rooms mostly going unused on a day-to-day basis, making it trivial to set one of them up as a conference room complete with a round table, some refreshments on the side table and some decently comfy chairs. Walking in, you clear your throat as you get right to it.

"Sorry I'm a little late, what I was doing took up more time than I expected," you explain to everyone. "Incidentally, Covenant will need a few people to be sent there to take it over, as none of its former inhabitants are alive right now."

"Oh, what'd they do?" Nora asks, cradling her belly a she shifts a little. Fuck, but she's so sexy like this. Though she's hot in general, to stay in the realm of truth.

"They had some kind of weird ritualistic science homicide thing going on. Basically, they abducted people and murdered them regularly based on pretty much random answers on that stupid pop quiz test they gave them at the gate," you wave her off, adding a more complete description of everything to the cloud of telepathic thoughts accessible to most people in your network. "They had a whole underground facility with holding cells and torture rooms nearby and they even raided caravans passing by sometimes. Nasty business all in all, but they did set up in a good position for trader traffic and stuff like that."

Mention of them being raiders, which is technically a factual truth, makes things pretty clear and nobody asks any questions. Always wonderful when you don't need to elaborate on this completely retarded stuff.

"Please sit down, sir, we have some snacks on hand if you may wish?" Codsworth asks, walking behind you bearing a tray in his robot butler hands. Always so nice to see your work being used as intended.

Anyway, you create a couple sweets fairies that begin to dart all over the room. "No need, but if anyone else would like, we can have a few more refreshments in a moment. But let's not dawdle too much, we're here for a reason."

"Yes." Preston sits up, obviously agreeing with you. "Not that this isn't nice, but you wanted to talk about… Increased birth rates was it?"

Look at that, he can remember the words you tell him. He's doing good.

Concord is, in a word, the best thing that ever happened to the couple hundred people that have flocked to this place to settle it as the Minutemen made it clear it was safe and open to immigrants. That means pretty much all civilians at all amiable to get out of the dirt they're shitting onto within miles have come, only a few stubborn fools still staying where they are.

Dirt farmers, scavengers, displaced people- they're all there now, in the newly built city, with actual brick houses and basic infrastructure established. They have secure shelter, no constant mortal danger over their heads, regular meals, some basic medicine and long story short, they've pretty much been catapulted from what is essentially worse than the dark age to semi-modern standards.

That's good for them, obviously. But much more importantly for your consideration, it means their bodies are about to realize 'hey, man, this place is great, let's go all in on reproducing like fucking crazy'.

That's an actual thing, by the way. Studies (that probably never took place in this dimension, but screw this dimension anyway) have shown that animals that are facing less acute stressors and an abundance of food just kick into overdrive as far as that kinda stuff is concerned. Meaning that you foresee a decently-sized baby boom in the next few months.

People are fucking more than before and they'll be producing more sperm, be more fertile and all that jazz compared to before. It's just how this stuff works. Which means that you need to be prepared, of course.

"So, knowing what to expect, what do we do to be prepared?" You ask. Preston, Codsworth and Nora are all here to give you some feedback and provide their own suggestions, their respective viewpoints and expertise specifically requested here.

A bevy of ideas and thoughts are floated around your spontaneously-made council, but most of the things you can agree on end up being worked into a big concept you can sum up as making education accessible and mandatory, pretty much.

Quite simply put, you will have the Minutemen open and operate a school in the middle of the city, you have enough buildings set aside for cases just such as this anyway, and fill it with a list of books that seem like they would work out for this stuff and a couple teachers hired to pretty much get the kids to understand what they are supposed to.

It's really a miniscule kind of education compared to a more modern standard, but reading, writing, simple maths and some history and stuff like that should serve as a foundation for this stuff. You will be moving the standard jobs available away from simple labor and more in the direction of cerebral tasks and 'people skills' kinds of things over time, so ensuring that future robot overseers can count their charges and their results properly is really the least you should be doing.

Wouldn't do to have food production be inhibited because a second generation of 'Hamburglars' outwits the people responsible for it. The thought alone fills you with second-hand shame.

Relatedly, one part of the 'school' will double up as a library available to the public so that if anyone intends to further their education by themselves they shall be free to do so. And if they need help, well, the same rooms meant for kids to learn inside of can be filled with adults just as well, really.

It will be designed as a sort of vocational college teaching evening classes for anyone that cares to attend. More focused around practical skills that people may need, probably, unless interest in pottery classes turns out to be great enough they need to be arranged.

So there you go. The Minutemen, really you but they're your front, will be paying for standardized mandatory education to start with. As your operations expand, the whole thing will probably grow into more and more of an entire civilian sector of life, but as it is a single high-rise building will do to cover all the needs you foresee popping up for a good couple years.

And because you're delegating all of the practical setup to Preston anyway, you don't need to care about that at all!

Incidentally, there will be no real concerted policy in regards to childbirths, that can all just… develop naturally for the time being. People can just have as many kids as they want to, your already implemented free food and pretty much free healthcare should suffice on that front. The most you're actively doing is figuring out a baby food formula you can have provided free of charge- many mothers have trouble providing enough breast milk naturally and the wasteland diet doesn't necessarily help with that, far as you know.

Hence you have to take out your good old science-er soul setup and get to work on figuring out what easily available foodstuff you could feed to babies to make them grow up properly. Shouldn't be hard at all, right?

Turns out tatos and carrots are a great way to go here, causing you to send a few orders out to have more of the latter planted over at Abernathy Farm just in case. Add in a few pieces of mirelurk meat (really just a few and finely reduced to a mash with the other ingredients) and you have a healthy meal in a bottle, enough for any toddler to not die.

You know, which is already much better than most get out there.

Lexington was, once upon a time, an actually decently-sized city in the United States of America- it had to be, else there wouldn't have been several thousands of ghouls left over after the bombs fell and transformed the people that received the right amount of radiation over the correct span of time.

Simply put, what's left of the city ruins is actually quite expansive. Also completely empty of all life after your purge of the whole location, but that's secondary, really. What matters is that you have a factory running there and that the workers are being teleported back and forth under the guise of their own Torpid transports set aside for 'company use'.

It was the easiest way to deal with the logistical aspects of requiring a human touch for a select few tasks- quality control and oversight, for the most part. Your machines are extremely efficient at churning out everything you need and then assembling the parts into complete Torpids, but every now and then slight mistakes and issues manifest themselves. They usually aren't anything too problematic and at most require a couple parts to be recycled instead of used, but you do much prefer to have some people on hand to do so.

You don't want another Mt. Glenn incident where your machines just decide to act and evolve on your own without your knowledge- you've been hesitant to actively correct things over on Remnant because, let's be honest, they're actually doing a good job and you're loath to fix something that's not broken, but still.

Generally speaking, the current status quo suits you just fine, but it would be pretty neat to actually have an on-site dormitory for your employees to live inside of. It may take some considerable amounts of time, but you want Lexington to become a second Concord at some point, a restored old-world city under your complete control and populated with the descendants of your cattle, domesticated sufficiently to be trusted not to accidentally kill themselves all over the place.

If they do it, you expect them to do it deliberately, at least.

But back to your purpose on returning to the trashheap that used to stand all around you. After you cleansed the city of any noticeable amounts of wildlife, your robots fell over it like a swarm of locusts, taking apart everything in sight, from buildings to shopping carts strewn across the sidewalk. The majority of pretty much everything has already been recycled, being in no condition to be restored anyway, meaning that aside from a few smaller buildings that have just been cleared out and given new walls here and there, you're standing on a flat expanse of land, even the sewers having been scraped out and sprayed over with massive waves of disinfectant.

Now let's get to work rebuilding a little something right away!

Well, it wouldn't exactly be you if you just went and let this chance pass you by, now would it? You aren't about to go around and completely redesign the standard apartment building as you have your robots build all over the place already anyway, that would be a lot of work for very little reward, but… How about its insides?

You're going to great length to avoid being too forceful in pushing the theme you're going for all over the place while still using the same motives everywhere you can fit them- from the cups in the cupboards to the chairs all throughout the apartments' rooms.

Cat ears. Paw designs. Cat faces everywhere. if someone doesn't like them, they can just get themselves a couple of other, well, everything, but the standard supply shall be plenty of cat-related objects. Not a single one is living in this place, of course, but someone that doesn't know better could very well believe otherwise until they investigate.

Yes. This is good. You've always been more of a cat person, though you certainly don't mind dogs either, but you still fondly remember that stray cat you once knew as a kid. The shaggy little monster helped you through some of the worst of growing out of your parents' shadow and realizing you should be hating their guts with full force and received plenty of belly rubs and random cat-digestible treats in return.

Man, you miss that cat. It's been over a decade, but Miss Purrsworth will forever live on in your heart. And yes, that name was great and suited the thing perfectly. Used to hang out around your elementary school's playground, out at the edges, and warned you when that car full of policewomen was in the area.

You suppress a shudder as you put the finishing touches on your last iteration of the 'kitty mug'. Not that you're one to condemn roaming rape gangs in principle, but they did make it a point to seek you out whenever they decided it was time to pretend you were being investigated for some reason or another.

The bad old times, huh? Turns out you have something in common with the older generations of Brocktonites that still remember that time period in the city's history.

Boston is one massive clusterfuck as far as you're concerned, even more so than most of Earth Fallout at this point. The city was massive enough only a very good chunk of it to the south-west was blown to pieces, leaving the majority in ruins, but still standing… And, this being the post-apocalyptic hellscape it is, absolutely teeming with everything unpleasant that can be found anywhere in the Commonwealth, according to what you know.

Raiders, supermutants, mirelurks, all the giant bugs you could want, feral ghouls around every corner… And that' just the first things that spring to mind. Robots still roaming the city streets for some reason, whatever security measures similarly survived the big boom nearby, miscellaneous psychopaths that don't fit into the 'raider' category are all around and sitting in any of the many, many dilapidated, but still intact buildings.

Some of the largest raider gangs around are said to be situated somewhere in the ruin, too- turns out the nowadays labyrinthine streets are some prime territory for their ilk, as anyone that wants to get anywhere on a larger scale eventually needs to pass through Boston, possibly in part due to Diamond City's location, too. It's actually kind of interesting from that perspective, but none of that's why you're making your way through the place right now.

You've picked up some rumours (as in, the Minutemen have on your behalf, same difference) about some kind of fight club for raiders, the 'Combat Zone', not too far from Diamond City itself. The place is supposed to be some kind of 'neutral zone' where scum coming from different gangs can come and fuck around, which to you sounds a lot like 'here there be buffet'.

It's so nice and easy to say that when you eat people.

Finding the right place just takes a bit of walking from your original teleport destination, as you just so happen to know the address of your target. Yes, yes, profoundly astounding addresses are still a thing, but if the infrastructure is still around and street signs still legible…

Intersection of Lagrange and Tremont, smack dab in the middle of the theatre district. Finding the right alley, you nod at the sign you see announcing to all exactly what this place is and what to expect.

Someone took Marketing 101 to heart, you see.

Of course there's also half a dozen raiders in tattered clothes wearing cloth sacks and gas masks, all of which are obviously hopped up on something and looking for trouble. However, you know to outwit foes like this, that are decidedly even more outmatched in a battle of the mind than in terms of physical confrontation as far as you're concerned.

"And who the fuck are you supposed to-"

"Shut up, fuck off and choke on a dick, bitch," you bluntly insult the moron that raises his voice as you walk straight past him. A direct touch works best for guys like this- just projecting confidence in your ability to murder them is more than enough ninety percent of the time. "And if its too small, find your mommy."

None of them are possessed of the presence of mind to try and stop you as you open the doors to the Combat Zone, easily and swiftly infiltrating the place. Nice and smooth, Gabriel, nice and smooth.

Inside, you find about what you expected; trashed, ruined and stinking of human refuse, but at least the litter isn't trying to so much as touch you, which is a mild upgrade to the usual.

Interestingly, the place that would have been occupied by cashiers and registers back when this was still a functioning theater is currently filled with a row of kneeling raiders, tied up and looking out glumly. The simple sign reading 'Rule Breaker' says it all, really, especially as half of them are naked and available.

Absolutely disgusting, of course, years of drug abuse and hard fighting for survival having left their traces on them, but good on them that this place is a little more lenient than the usual bullet people get when they fuck around.

You can hear cheering and booing coming from further in, the door to the stage wide open.

You stride onward, undeterred by the wave of air blowing against you as you come through into the theater proper, cheap alcohol and body odor emanating from it like a physical presence striking at your nostrils. The stage has seen some redevelopment, as anyone with eyes can see, an uneven cage constructed on it to hold matches inside of, little spotlights ringing it and all.

There's also a bunch of audience seats, improvised out of whatever seating was portable enough, and a couple of these usual shoddy wooden constructions all around, one serving as a bar of sorts and one being filled with an announcer, a ghoul that half-heartedly narrates the fight currently going on between some freckled redhead with short hair and a random raider wearing a sack over his head as per usual.

Holding back the urge to snort as the male raider takes a vicious hook to the chin, probably earning himself a concussion and a subsequent asskicking worthy of a textbook. A dirty one with a couple of missing pages, but still.

Looking closer at her, she looks like she's the perhaps highest person in the room right now, her heart beating rapidly in that unnatural way you've learned to associate with people on stimulants- crack or psycho or something. Most likely psycho in this case, as jet doesn't last particularly long and you can't think of any other common drugs on Earth Fallout you've come across that'd work quite like this.

"And Cait goes for the kill, ladies and gentlemen! Bocker is down and taking his beating like a man, but for how long?" So she's called Cait, then. Thanks, weird announcer ghoul.

And he's right, the guy in the cage is on the ground now, having been felled by a low kick and a push to the gut, so now the kind of Irish-looking cage fighter is keeping him down by stomping him repeatedly, then getting on her knees to keep punching his face and torso.

Yeah, this doesn't look like it'll last much longer.

Well, this is increasingly looking like the female cage fighter might be interesting to keep around, or at least she meets the basic prerequisites to join the Crypts' inner circle, that being female and vicious like ten moose in a one-moose pouch.

Yes, a pouch, not a bag. That part's important.

You lean back, considering how you'd test her. Kate mentioned something about that, about how once the Crypts became this huge thing they had to make sure that anyone above the street-level members knew to handle themselves and not embarrass the rest of your organization. You know she did get some ex-ABB martial arts dojo thing on payroll to do some basic self-defense training for the members that need it…

Well, you can always just do this right here, right now, you suppose, shrugging. Twisting and pinching your aura, you use some of it to materialize Carmilla, the richly dressed woman's presence clashing with the dirt and dust all around even worse than your own. Her cape flaps in a nonexistent wind for a long moment as she soaks up the room's attention before casting it off, the glass you decided to summon her with shattering against the floor.

"This awful place requires some sprucing up on the double," she declares, ascending to the stage and kicking open a hole into the cage standing ready, giving Cait a confident smirk. "Care to assist me?"

Still high on whatever she took to keep up her best physical performance, the young woman shoots onto her feet, snarling at your minion. "You bet'cha ye'r about to get yer ass kicked!"

Someone's being one cranky baby today, you see.

Well, there you go, your aura projection leading things with a straight right punch. She's deliberately holding herself back, too, not making use of any of the enhanced abilities you confer to your minions as a matter of course; instead, keeping to the strength of a normal human, she's executing the maneuver at a speed Cait can actually follow, still possessed of your own sheer skill in terms of fighting.

The fighter throws herself to the side, dodging the attack and throwing herself into a sloppy counter, putting her full force behind a double-handed hammer blow to Carmilla's side. Not particularly bothered, your projection sidesteps, already back to her neutral stance, and advances into a sweeping kick that has her opponent splayed onto the ground with a meaty thwack- the same kind of move that she used to fell her previous foe.

Carmilla steps back. "Is that all? Disappointing."

Cait growls, a wide grin growing on her face as she rises once again. "Oh, yae want more? You gonna get some."

"It seems you may be worth the attention, then. Do try not to disappoint again."

Meanwhile, half the audience is looking at the fight gaping, an actual instance of some decent level of combat unfolding before their very eyes, while the other half is staring at you and the way you just exerted a swirl of colors into a seemingly living, breathing being (Carmilla is neither of those, undeath for the win).

You probably should do something about that.

Cait ducked under another damn straight punch, her hair pulled by the wind pressure. This weird chick that'd busted her fight was fucking fast and strong, but she was faster; all she needed to do was find an opening and lay into the bitch.

She used her weight to get in close hard and fast, ramming her arm in with the rest of her body and hammering it into her stomach- except the blonde (she was blonde, right) pushed her fist to the side with an open hand, making Cait stumble and turning her to the side.

Then she got another smack in the back, hitting the cage with her face. That would suck for a while.

Shaking it off, she turned around again, the chick she was fighting just standing there, waiting. The fuck did she think she was doing? That she was so good she didn't need to come after Cait?

She snarled, feeling her heartbeat go faster. She'd show the bitch! Every time she'd tried hitting her, she'd just defre- dele- moved her blows around. She needed to hit her so hard she couldn't do that, then she'd have her on the ropes!

"Oh dear. Do we really need to begin with that?"

Cait snarled, letting the provos- prof- the taunting set her on fire, make her burn harder and hotter. She'd show her! She'd-!

Cait didn't realize what happened. One sec she was charging in a full body tackle, to bring the bitch to the ground and lay into her, the next she was on the ground herself, feeling a boot on the back of her head.

"Rule number one," the posh cunt said slowly. "Think. If you do not think, anyone that does will defeat you like the flailing child you are."

"Hrrg!" Cait pushed, but she couldn't get her off without breaking her neck. Then the foot shifted, drawing across her neck and onto her back.

"Unless that is what you wish for? It would be a mild waste, but keeping you as nothing but bait for 'struggle snuggle' is entirely possible." Then she stepped off of Cait, so she turned and twisted to get back at her throat. "Acceptable. You could be faster, however."

She bit her lip, looking at the bitch. She wasn't winded at all, nothing that she'd tried so far had worked. She needed to… she needed…

"You need to try something else, I believe," the daft cunt announced, head cocked. "I would suggest focusing, but I believe you are too out of your mind to have a chance. Better luck in your next life, should you be allowed one."

A cold feeling spread in Cait's stomach. She ignored it. She wasn't gonna die. She was-

There were screams, she realized. Cait looked to the side, staring uncomprehendingly at the line of raiders, their 'clients' as Tommy called them, being dragged along by this weird thing without skin in the shape of a woman.

There was a man. He was just as weird as the chick in the cage with her. He reached out a hand and- he bit into one of the assholes in the Combat Zone, blood spilling all over the place and then somehow bending to flow into his mouth anyway. He dropped the dead body like she did a needle she'd used for a couple months already.

"Distraction. Deadly, in a fight."

For the first time, the weird chick attacked her, hammering a fit into Cait's stomach from the side. The air was knocked out of her lungs, but she returned fire with a backwards elbow, hitting nothing but air in return.

"Try to keep up. Show the Master what you have. Or die and be forgotten like the rest. Your choice."

A spike of fear shot up inside of her. It poked into her rage, but the two tras- trans- became a single thing, a heavy, lead weight inside of her head.

She needed to fight. She needed to win. She needed to get Tommy and-

A smack to her face, throwing her down again. "That is not what I meant when I told you to think. Fight."

Cait got up and fought.

Cait had no idea how often she kissed the ground in the hour or so of fighting that had to be following, but she started to low down after a few minutes, breathing going slower, harder… Shit, she wasn't keeping up anymore…

"Oh? Is this all you have, after all?" She'd gotten used to hearing that shit. "Can you only fight when you're hopped up on whatever quaint little juices you prefer?"

"I'll show you a shit fighter," Cait mumbled to herself, blinking her eyes into clarity again. She'd gotten off psycho plenty of times, this wasn't anything new. She just needed to… focus.

This time when she came, she feinted a kick, like she'd done a couple times, but this time she followed through with a jump instead, pushing herself through the air and pivoting like crazy. She totally expected her foot to be caught- the woman's footing was rock solid and she kept on blocking and deflecting everything- but that was exactly why she kept up her momentum and-

The wind was knocked out of her once again, the stranger's free arm punching a hole through her damn stomach mid-air it felt like. Gasping, Cait caught herself anyway, not staying on the ground and instead stumbling right back onto her feet as she made contact with it again.

"Good. Better. You're finally learning," the blonde chick remarked.

"Hard not to with this much repetition," Cait coughed. Then she paused. "You've been teaching me. Why?"

"So you aren't a complete waste of the Master's time, of course." Right. That. Creepy worship thing, got it. Cait glanced outside the cage, figuring they weren't fighting right then anyway. Tommy was down from his booth, talking to the man that'd killed all the raiders- and wasn't that something- while the other two things piled the bloodless bodies onto a pile in the corner.

The guy didn't seem to be super aggressive, but she needed to-

"Do pay attention, dear." Cait snapped back around, blocking and countering the same old punch by instinct. "There we go. You have some talent for this, after all."

"You think I'd be doing this if I was some random moron dying in a ditch?" Cait frowned.

"No, I am just making an observation. You have promise. That's all."

"… And it's not like we can't figure something out, Concord's got enough space. Or we could see about fixing this place up, if you'd prefer." The words drifted into her ears as her head hit the cold metal of the cage again.

'Tommy Lonegan', as he went these days, wasn't quite sure what to make of the man wearing the first set of clean clothes he'd seen in centuries, but he'd always made it a point to keep an open mind. So if some weird wizard cannibal wanted to talk him into making more caps elsewhere, he'd be a fool to disagree.

He may have lost his nose when the bombs went off, but he could still sniff out a good deal when he heard one. Figuratively speaking.

"So yeah, let's look into having you open up a place," the man that'd introduced himself as Gabriel said casually, like it was no big deal. Then again, with enough cash in hand it wasn't, Tommy knew. "Maybe not make it mortal combat and avoid throwing random civilians into the ring, but I'm sure you could figure something out."

"Heh, well, I could always go back to good old molerat races. Those usually end with just as much violence," he remarked, feeling the dangerous pull to let down his guard like it was a solid thing. "The classics are classics for a reason."

"You know, if it wasn't such a giant pain, pitting wasteland creatures against each other could be cool, too. See how many rad-scorpions it takes to bring down a deathclaw and all that."

That was exactly what Tommy meant. Gabriel was likable in a way no man that'd just brutally reduced a dozen hardened psychopaths to begging victims before eating them alive should be.

"Yeah, well, maybe look into capturing bugs or something?" He proposed just to keep the conversation going. "Would be a disaster if they got free and reproduced, though. And there's always the good old regulated cage matches to fall back on."

"Oh, maybe we could even hold robot matches," Gabriel said, snapping his fingers. "Building simple robots isn't all that hard with some specced-down stuff and it might give those inclined a healthy outlet for any creative urges they feel. You could really draw crowds with something like that."

… And damn, he was right. Tommy could see it already- tournament categories, to keep things to an even playing field, floating, small, heavy, whatever worked out best, plus there didn't need to be any rules with things like that, which was always a plus.

But the man still sitting in the same seat he'd taken before taking his usual clientele apart with the ease of a man cutting up a salisbury steak wasn't done yet. "We can build a proper area, too, make it so you have a decent audience to work with, and transmit big events over television or something once we get those spread across Concord. It's really just a matter of implementing things I've been too busy to take care of."

This whole gig was going to either fail explosively to succeed so badly Tommy didn't want to even think about the caps to be made. "That, uh, that sounds pretty great there. A little too great, that is. Where's the catch?"

"The catch is that I don't give a fuck. Whether things work out is up to you and the demand for spectacle you can drum up in a city of a couple hundred people. Population's growing, but even if you can play the long game, you'll still need to figure things out in the short term."

Yeah. Couldn't dispute that. Speaking of… "I recall the lady in the ring saying something about 'testing' Cait?"

"Oh yeah, she's decent enough in a scrap. I don't think she'd be up for joining the Minutemen, but I wanted to see where she's at while I was at it already," Gabriel blandly noted.

Tommy winced as his Little Bird was slammed into the ground for the third time in as many minutes. She wasn't going to stay standing much longer. "I see. Well, if I'll be setting up shop somewhere new, I'll have to find someplace for her to earn her keep in the meantime…" He suggested.

Gabriel got up. Tommy did his best not to react as he and the two skinless monsters he'd just… created or conjured or whatever followed after him, the obviously nonhuman woman inside the ring kicking Cait towards him.

"Hey, Cait, is it? I've been talking with Tommy and he'll be moving his business a little," he said. "You interested in changing employers for a while?"

"Lemme… hit you… once…"

"Nope, no deal. Any other payment you'd like?" Gabriel asked, leaning against the cage Tommy had made out of whatever he'd found back then.

"I want good… fights, and lots of… caps…" Tommy's Little Bird gasped.

"Can do. Pleasure to be working with you, I guess. I can already think of a few people that could use a bodyguard or two."

Tommy was glad. He really was. He didn't like to admit it, but Cait… Was kind of like a daughter to him, sometimes. He'd been thinking of ways he could get her off those chems she took for a while now, so hopefully this Gabriel fella would keep her too occupied for that shit.

A man could hope.

The creation of bugs capable of the specific requirements she held had been a matter of time and time only, Taylor reasoned, with the way unrestrained FEV had a tendency to enlarge insects and enhance their already present traits. Still, she had her enhanced spider silk, ready for her to use at will.

Her new clothes, already well-received by Gabriel, had been only the beginning. She still made it a point to pose and practice in them, to make sure they sat just right and never slipped out of place… too much.

She was already showing off her body. If she showed off any more, it had better be on purpose.

It was something she would have never done in the past, but now that she was looking perfect… It had to be something most vampires felt, she thought, the knowledge and certainty their bodies were not just better than anything conceivable by normal human measures, but also perfectly shaped to their own desires, conscious or not.

She still wasn't entirely used to this herself, but she was getting there. Taylor was also keeping the glasses despite not needing them anymore- she looked different enough as it was, she would need every bit of camouflage she could get to slip back into her old life.

As much as it was, at any rate. She didn't really see anyone noticing beside her dad… maybe. Jury was still out on that one.

And her dad was an entire different story by himself. She'd take care of it when they returned to Earth Bet.

A radroach walked past, its back bearing her notebook and a pen. Taylor didn't need to take notes anymore as such, but it helped her put her head in order, a little idiosyncracy she'd found a few other vampires to share. Maybe one day she would take some time and write a book or two, but eternity had a way of letting her procrastinate for however long she needed to.

She was finding herself to be a lot calmer and more focused these days, no longer a prisoner of flesh inside her own body. Taylor even used to be a little disgusted by her own bugs, not letting them touch her bare skin, but well, her body and her bugs were interchangeable now.

She called upon her 'costume', a swarm of insects covering her from head to toe within moments. It wasn't perfect, but it would do until she had time to construct something better, something sufficient not to be a drag compared to her other protections.

Until then, and in fact in general, she would have spiders and centipedes continue to comb her hair. Her original power may not have been the most powerful or impressive at first glance, but she was finding more and more uses for it the longer she had it.

But enough about that. People may be afraid of her and she may have been disheartened by it (just a little, though, for Gabriel had always been a rock for her to hold on to), but now she needed to leave all of that behind.

With her unholy rebirth beyond death, Taylor had decided to reinvent herself. Not as a cape, but as a person.

Her morals were a far-off memory, little more than a distant, silly dream she remembered having some time ago, and so she needed to go over every decision she had ever made and reframe it under the new paradigm she now operated under. Letting Emma and Sophia (and their faceless minions) push her around that easily had been an objective mistake, but the reasons for why had changed.

She should have simply slapped some sense into her father years ago. She should have talked to uncle Alan about Emma, to get her the help she so obviously needed, whether she wanted to or not. Especially if she didn't want it.

She also should have taken joy in ending all those people she killed during her first night out as not only did they deserve it, they absolutely did not have to put themselves into those positions. Sure, Lung may have put them there… But they could have run away, at least.

Brockton Bay wasn't the whole world by any measure.

More importantly, Taylor found herself writing, at length, about how she had nearly come to view the world. Come to thought of people as either victims, aggressors or bystanders.

And how anyone that would have stood against her or her wishes would have fallen into the second category. Which was complete insanity, of course; at best, everyone was a victim to herself or other vampires, but she felt like she needed to work this out piece by piece.

Everyone was guilty in some way. Everyone deserved what they were getting once she or the other Crypts got their hands on them. However, they did need to spare the majority of any given population just to retain its use. Therefore, it was time she abandoned the silly notion of morality entirely and instead thought of people as those that held some use… And those that had outlived theirs.

She'd need to ask Gabriel about how he did this. He usually did the right thing anyway.

Piper Wright breathed a sigh of relief, knowing her silly sister was occupied for two hours thereabout. That meant she had two hours of uninterrupted 'her' time, at least.

Ever since she'd… 'Made Gabriel's acquaintance', Nat had been unceasingly curious about him and when he would be coming back… Just as Piper had been waiting for the same, if she was to be honest. She normally wasn't one for one-nighters or casual flings, but maybe if the average man around the city was anywhere near his standard, she would be open to more of that.

… She still refused to go out and search for him. That wasn't how that worked. Still, Piper had investigated Gabriel, the mysterious stranger showing up to make changes to place and then disappear at his leisure.

He'd been strange for sure, when she'd first seen him. He'd held himself upright, casually confident, like there wan't anything in the world that could stop or even inconvenience him. That alone wasn't unusual in some people, but for some reason Piper found herself believing it when it was him, as opposed to macho guys that ate a bullet about as well as the next guy over.

Then there was his clothing. Simple white shirt and black jacket, jeans, black shoes… But each of them had been too smooth. Too perfect. It had taken her a while before Piper had thought to ask a ghoul that'd lived long enough to remember the time before the war about it, over in Goodneighbor, but they could be explained as having been inside some warehouse that'd been untouched for centuries, perfectly sealed and preserved.

The likelihood of that was abysmal, of course, but it was one way he could have gotten perfectly fitting and clean clothes.

Then there was the Minutemen Connection. Through gathering and comparing rumours and hearsay, just like she sometimes did to gather information for her articles, Piper had come to the conclusion that Gabriel was extremely likely the reason the Minutemen had been able to rebuild Concord 'in one night and one day', where they'd gotten their weapons and the robots…

It would seem, to her, that this Gabriel was the origin of many of the changes taking place to the North of Boston, as well as right inside of Diamond City. How did he do all of this? What his goal? His plan?

Piper had considered writing an article about it. Spreading the news was still her job, after all, and if he didn't have anything to hide, he sure wouldn't mind, right?

… Was what she liked to think. At the end of the day, Piper was comfortable writing critically of the mayor because they both knew he wouldn't dare act against her openly, not where the rest of the city could see it- the bit about keeping her out had been outside of it for a reason- but Gabriel, for all that she'd let him inside her home (and body) was still a mystery to her.

She couldn't risk anything happening to Nat. So instead she just did as she'd been pretending, using the info she'd gathered to write about the Minutemen. Her bratty sister would be getting herself into enough trouble as she was already anyway.

Speaking of, she's still be at school for… an hour or so? Man, time sure flew when she was working at her terminal. But until then…

She still did remember what they'd done that night. Not all of it, but damn, feeding nuka to each other by kissing had been so hot. Time for this reporter to go get out of her pants.