Having achieved a favorable advance in time, you retreat into your inner world to implement a few changes to some long-standing blueprints of devices that you have grown to rely on heavily for a while now, combining some of your burgeoning knowledge of the true nature of the world and reality at large with well-used and amply tested practical technology.
You suspect, and have for a while now, that the way time, and more specifically time dilation, works inside your palace has less to do with it going faster or slower relative to reality around you and more in how time as a concept works completely different inside. It does not simply pass, in a linear matter nor otherwise, but rather it is… saved up, stocked up on in a reserve of sorts.
Then, once you decide to use it, the flow of time is accelerated, giving you more of it… And looking like time is accelerated (or decelerated) when you look in on it from the outside.
It would explain a lot. Like what exactly the Timekeeper is actually doing all the, pun intended, time.
But anyway, you have a lot of reality-breaking science to do!
Getting your ass inside your lab, you call the usual suspects together, having been inspired a little by some of the various things you've done and seen lately to the point you just legitimately can't help yourself.
In short order you have everything set up in a remote operated site as you have taken to using for pretty much everything potentially unsafe these days, carefully observing the process taking place under controlled conditions.
It's somewhat reminiscent of a big altar, but only superficially; under slabs of metal and repeating symbols, you actually do have machinery and a bunch of intricate mechanisms running all over, all directed towards a single point right on top of everything.
Of course not all your assistants are appreciative of your groundbreaking, state-of-the-art advances…
"It can't possibly succeed," Yoshi complains, gesturing for the big monitor you're using for this in addition to a few smaller ones to let you watch from several angles. "Half of this… Construction, doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I know you can pull a fast one on physics sometimes, but-"
"Shh, just watch, it's about to start," you whisper, increasing the energy input slowly, but steadily via a little lever you actually have specifically for this.
Because your soul lab is just awesome like that.
"Whatever is supposed to happen will do so now, I suppose," Indigo adds her own two cents, pushing a strand of the hair she's named after back behind her ear. "Are you sure this is safe?"
The test chamber begins to glow in a dark blue light, almost black, in fact, as the underlying mechanisms rotate around themselves, both clockwise and counter-clockwise, steadily achieving higher and higher rotation, and an unholy sound is emitted by the whole procedure, not even loud or nailbiting, just unnatural to behold, like a thousand sighs and whispers laid over the stretching of a tired limb's cracking bones and the amplified blinking sound an eye makes, too quiet normally to be heard.
In a flash of darkness, a purple, semi-amorphous mass crystallizes, a small core of it forming and distending, stretching, twisting into place, more and more of the material you mean to use as a superior alternative to nuclear fusion being brought into existence,
It glows as it moves, but darkens where it finishes doing so, a moving work of art where more and more sparks and miniaturized shooting stars of light wisp along the surface and through the holes in the construction, adding together into a brighter-
Wait, holes in the construction?
"… Okay, this is a good first step," you announce to the spellbound audience, your little science team lost for words, but hopefully still capable of understanding yours, "this is a very good first step, but there's a critical problem."
Julianne tilts her head, eyes still locked ont the now erratically twitching, supernaturally energetic substance. "What kind of problem?"
"This prototype is unstable and likely to explode."
"This can't be happening. It doesn't make sense," Yoshi whispers, but everyone ignores him.
"Explode how?" Indigo asks.
"Explosively, duh."
And just in that moment, Nolac appears, having excused themselves in the early stages of construction on account of having neither any idea what was going on nor really interested in finding out. "Hey guys, I brought popcorn, what'd I miss?"
"The popcorn's probably a wash, actually," you let them know. "This whole place is about to go boom."
"Wait, what? We're behind a dozen layers of heavy plating and-"
The lab explodes.
Luckily, no actual permanent damage is suffered by anyone involved, as death isn't really a thing within this internal world of yours; sure a section of your massive palace suffered a considerable malfunction of its ability to stay un-exploded, but that sorts itself out in short order, the structure regenerating itself just as the souls within do, allowing you to return to your scientific pursuits before long.
"My arms… Where are my arms?" Yoshi, of course, is being a massive baby as always, but you don't let his attitude detract from the science you're doing.
"Don't worry, sweetie, I'll be your arms until you get them back. Promise," Indigo tells him, a hand on his knee as she leans in close… And Nolac, with the same delicacy as always, leans over him from behind, both of them having suffered less completely catastrophic damage from your last go-round.
"Man, if we were in realspace, I could make that literal. Would make fapping something special for you, wouldn't it?" They muse, shit-eating, wide grin on their face.
"Excuse me?" Indigo demands more than asks, protectively nudging Nolac away from her man.
"Excused," they shrug, taking a seat next to him on the little row of chairs that rebuilt themselves after the first prototype blew up. "So anyway, what just popped our corn, some new warhead or somethin'?"
"I wouldn't know," the armless wonder grumbles, "our 'glorious overlord' hasn't deigned to let anyone know as of yet."
"Oh, I didn't?" In your defense, you were kind of busy trying to perfect your envisioned way of abusing this little loophole you found in the laws of reality. "Well, you know how fusion cores work by operating within the principles of physics, just grossly well-adjusted?"
"Oh no…"
"I decided I had a better idea. I shall call them… Eldritch Cores! Mostly because 'reality warping zero-point energy generation device' doesn't have the same pizzazz to it, if you know what I mean."
"Oh no… !"
"So yeah, this is basically my attempt at completely fucking over reality so it just gives us unlimited amounts of energy in a mass-reproducible package. These are just the growing pains until we get there."
"…" You get the impression that, if Yoshi had hands at this time, he would be burying his face in them right now. But hey, you're finally getting off fusion cores as such! That's something he's wanted to achieve for months now!
"Just imagine, with a couple of the things, I could drive entire cities. And if they're as malleable as I think they should be, we could easily fuse several pieces together into larger, exponentially more energetic versions that could very easily supply enough energy for planet-sized structures!" You're already salivating at the mere thought.
"You'll need some kind of superconductors at that scale," Julianne courteously informs you, stretching her now completely regenerated body to test its limits. "With the amount of energy and distances we're talking about, energy loss would be atrocious at the best of times."
"Yeah, well, we can always work with several smaller clusters to counteract that to an extent, but you are right, I'll add superconductors to my shopping list." Not like you'd say no to a sample or two to work with if you manage to find any. "In the meantime, who's ready for test number two?"
"Are you insane, you'll kill us all! Again!" Yoshi waves his stumps around, already back to nearly having elbows again.
"Everyone got better, don't be a drama queen." And like that, you re-initiate the process.
"NOOO!"
Again, he's overreacting, as always. This time around there's a few bubbles on the surface, a couple of temporary instabilities during the material's generation, but it works, mostly, the whole mass coalescing and pulling itself together.
Into two small pieces of multicolored, shimmering… stuff. It's technically both a solid and a form of energy, completely breaking how matter is supposed to work, but that's exactly why you're making it, after all. The deeper parts are completely black, leaking some 'black light' even as the multicolored outer parts oscillate through the rainbow in small waves, but it looks good… For now.
"Technically it was supposed to result in one single piece, but I suppose we'll just have to adjust the process going forward," you judge the small pieces, each of them roughly half the size of your fist. As you speak, you observe with fascination as the speed at which the colors shift increases, almost as if in reaction.
"Did it-" You hold up a hand. Yes, it did.
Then you raise both hands, palms turned towards one another.
"Don't you dare," Yoshi warns in a hissed whisper, stumpy arms raised. "Don't-"
You clap, and the lab explodes again.
Well, you have to test this new technology extensively- you plan to use it in place of the fusion cores that you put just about everywhere, which means it has to be absolutely foolproof to avoid accidentally blowing up a country or two the moment it malfunctions.
A few self-inflicted immaterial explosions are nothing in comparison to what you stand to gain, after all.
So… You continue messing with this stuff, changing the way it's synthesized to get a… less temperamental product out of it. As you do so, you can see a steady, noticeable improvement- after just a few more of those catastrophic explosions and, you suspect, Yoshi just giving up on life, you get the knack for it down, identifying the issues and eliminating them one by one until all that you have left are fun little stones that hold the power of a small star inside them.
Well, maybe not quite that extent of energy, but they make you feel like they do. They can function, and they can function well, when introduced to the right equipment, letting you siphon literally unlimited power from them- there's only so much at any given time of course, but this draw of energy is constant without ever reducing the stuff you're using as a base in either size or charge or whatever.
Basically, they're producing energy ex nihilo. At last. At last physics shall bow before you!
More than it already does, anyway.
Putting the semi-matter into casings that can reliably continue to extract energy over longer periods of time requires a bit more fiddling, of course, but it's entirely doable, merely needing a bit of additional fine-tuning, but you already know enough about this field to-
"Is it just me," Julianne asks as you put the finishing touches on, "or is this material merging with its container?"
…
"Shit, you're right," you agree, watching as it just steadily grows to cover the whole thing. "Alright, you know the drill. Add this to the list of tests to conduct. Energy output?"
"Increasing exponentially," your surprisingly most reliable lab assistant reads out with a quick glance.
"Without any containment breaches or explosions, even. This is some fascinating stuff," you say, actually realizing the full potential of this new technology.
"Tell me about it. Now if only I was alive enough to get the full nobel prize round-up…"
"Pfh, why bother with those?" You ask. "When you have this kind of thing, you might as well just go and take over the world, that way you can add as many nobel prize categories as you want and get all of them anyway."
Eldritch Cores
Powerful energy sources made out of mysterious, colorfully shimmering material that seems to be filled with stars when seen from the corner of one's eyes
Can generate near endless energy, the only limitation is the size of the centerpiece, as the output scales with it
Can be created with basic technology, but requires less time per piece the more advanced the means being used are
Can merge with other pieces to increase in size, initiated on contact with each other
Small pieces can supply enough power to permanently supply a small city when 'raw' (not enhanced by merging with requisite technology)
Can merge with nearby technology, directly supplying it with additional power and enhancing it depending on its purpose (can be prevented by forcing it to merge with a containment shell first, this property is not transitive after the first merging)
Can temporarily merge with living beings when touched, causing pain and burns over the body's surface for several seconds
Your new and improved invention is put into mass production as soon as you have completed the research process into how to best do so, of course, the advanced facilities within your inner world and their infinite supply of soul matter materials ensuring that you don't face any issues on this side of the project. You'll only be able to manifest a couple of the Eldritch Cores at a time, of course, but having them on hand can only come in useful, in your own humble opinion.
It'll take a couple days to generate the hundred or so pieces and run them through the procedure to securely encase them in something that it can fuse with to further enhance energy output, but hey, you can work with that.
The visual effects when you do this are always very funky, you have to say. The technology fusion thing is pretty damn cool, even aside from the bug-wild insane capabilities that the addition of raw Eldritch Cores can just… add, to machines and devices, by being thrown at them and doing their thing.
Not to mention the virtually limitless supply of energy, as per their original design. You wonder whether intent has anything to do with that…
Well, anyway, you can't just stop here now that you've made this amazing discovery and promptly implemented it in a practical manner. No, you need to immediately set towards step two of your plan to revolutionize the field of… Everything, really, but especially your technological capabilities when you're left alone in a room or a cave for too long.
The manufactory. A miracle of modern vampire technology, capable of taking in a wide variety of materials and automatically turning them into the intended product. Miniature all-purpose factories, limited only by their need for those same materials and the usual inefficiencies that come with not specializing a piece of machinery like this to the point it rightly should- decreased speed of operation, mostly, at the point you reached after so many improvements and changes- but that's not enough, not anymore.
You can do better. You can go further. You can make them work not with the laws of physics, but in clear violation of the same.
It's simple in principle, really, you're kind of amused you never figured this out before. All it takes are a few changes here, a few twists in reality there using materials that shouldn't rightly be able to exist and technically actually don't, but feign doing so for the purposes of the machine you're building them into and voila, all you need to do is add a sizable Eldritch Core and you have what you want.
Not perfection, because perfection implies things that simply are not the case. But close to it, closer than you have ever come as of yet.
"I'm back," Yoshi announces, indicating that he has finished regrowing his legs and finding the nearest Maid body to request being brought back to your laboratory. "Did I miss many explosions?"
"None, actually, the one that blasted you off was the last one before we got everything down well enough we can now create as many Eldritch Cores as we like," you tell him, casually pointing at the small pile of the round shells containing the temperamental core materials while they're in the process of fusing with them. "Had a nice walk?"
"If I'd been able to walk, maybe," he grumbles to himself. Carefully keeping a distance from the best thing since sliced bread (though, given humanity, you should probably credit the internet here, or maybe guns), he returns to his prior seat, suspiciously eyeing the camera feeds of the centerpiece of your efforts this time, allowing him to observe it from all angles. "… Is that what I think it is?"
"If what you think about is a manufactory that completely breaks conservation of mass and can output several times the products it should be able to based on the materials put in, then yes, it is," you lightly state, absolutely proud in your new baby. "Incidentally, it can also completely rearrange things that it wouldn't have been able to before, such as turning wood chips into actual pieces of wood in whatever shape it needs or turning nutrient paste into actual meals somehow."
"What do you mean 'somehow', you built it! It can't fulfill any function that you did not design!"
"I don't know what to tell you, I was just trying to add a cooking module to the expended space inside that lets it be a full-sized set of factory floors somehow without even needing my magic stuff, but it somehow gained the ability to just rearrange its input on a molecular level, except not because it doesn't do so consistently," you explain your current conundrum. "It basically seems to be partially intent-based in what it does and what kinds of materials it can do this with, but-"
Yoshi just bashes his head against the table. And rears back up again, slamming it back down again, repeatedly and violently.
You think he may have a problem. What is Indigo even doing, she's supposed to specialize in psychology and he's still acting this unhinged?
Eldritch Manufactory
Can produce nearly any conceivable piece of technology or object, provided it has appropriate materials
Can recycle an extremely wide range of materials, including those that should not be reusable
Output of products is several times that which should be possible given input of materials
Can be supercharged with Eldritch Cores to double or triple production output without changing input
Can scan and copy nearby objects for convenience (copy )
Can generate certain sex toys and related articles for free
"Hey, uh, is it me or is it just randomly spitting out a bunch of those toys formed after your, you know?"
"… Dammit, how is it even doing that? We didn't put any rubber in, did we?"
"You built this hell-machine, you can- whoa!"
"Time to work on your dildo dodging skills, I guess."
Following the revelations your magical powers have revealed unto you, you go ahead and head towards the east from your last big destination, guided by the spell that lets you just find things you know to look for- and HalluciGen Inc. has a building you very much do know to look for, now, so nothing can keep you from making your way there.
… Well, if someone suddenly decided to blow the entire building up, that would put a crimp into your efforts, certainly, but you're confident that won't be likely, at the very least.
Not that's very hard to find the right place, just going along the streets and keeping your eyes open. The company logo is till standing strong against the test of time and it's not exactly inconspicuous by any means- that would be some really questionable marketing right there, after all.
Rounding the stairs, you make your way inside, mentally remarking on the relatively average size of HalluciGen's company building. You approach the doors, keeping an eye on the blood signatures you've spotted inside already.
Many of them seem to be acting strangely. Erratically. A couple, by comparison, are working in concert with one another, almost like they're small teams or something.
It's always hilarious when people think traditional tactics like working together and outnumbering you is going to do… Well, anything. And you don't exactly complain about the opportunity to have a full lunch's worth of souls throw themselves into your general direction.
Entering, you immediately note the mildly sour scent hitting your nostrils- and the green mist lying over the reception you find yourself in, likely filling the whole building.
You spontaneously decide not to breathe in too much of this stuff by way of ceasing to breathe for the moment. Chalk it up to the many cool little tricks you can pull just in case this stuff is somehow capable of eating through lungs or something.
Your Guidance spell mentioned something about test subjects, so you suppose that's what the signatures you noticed earlier are. And indeed, it doesn't take long for you to stumble over the dead body of a Gunner clad in military fatigues, shot in the back of the head and left behind.
… These guy have to be running out of people at this point. Seriously, for all that they're supposed to be some dangerous mercenary group with the best equipment and (some) actual training, you have yet to see any of their operations actually not blow up in their faces in person.
This could explain why Preston was so damn depressed back when you stumbled over him and his little group. The Minutemen were defeated by the Gunners, of all things, the assholes that, among other things, can't seem to defeat a bit of fancy mist by, say, strapping on some gas masks. No wonder; a blow to one's pride like that would lay anyone low.
Still you explore around a little, figuring that if they were actually researching and developing this stuff, HalluciGen had to have some actual research somewhere, so all you need to do is find where they wrote down how to make their products and you should be good to go.
Except, as you navigate through the building, you come through several areas one after the other that are not, in fact, what you're looking for, your path instead leading you through hallways that go past what you suspect to have been some kind of testing chambers and such. There's a bunch of Gunners, you presume, inside of them fighting each other.
Honestly, having some chemical weapons that make people just go nuts and kill each other would be hilarious. And, well, useful, of course. Not exactly as good as some of your other weapons, particularly the ones that involve you eating those same people instead, but when you're up against, say, armies of them anyway, or want to muddle the waters while massacring entire populations for once…
Going up to the first floor, you come across another one of the Gunners, a woman, that seems to have locked herself in a room. As you come closer, not bothering to hide your footsteps, she seems to perk up.
"Is there… Someone there?" She asks, seeming to need a moment to find the words.
"Sure am, unless someone's just imagining me," you joke. It's an inside joke about how your existence even works, of course, but she doesn't have to know that.
"Good… Enough. Could you come to the… Window?"
True enough, there's a pane of glass beside the locked door, so you follow along, bemused by this whole situation.
"There, you're… Real," she shouts to be heard, closing her eye and opening them again rhythmically. "I was… You have to leave. We came, but there was a chemical leak… I can't remember… Anything."
"Anything?" You ask, eyebrow raised.
"Anything," she repeats. "Forgot my name, forgot who I was. Doesn't… Matter now."
Well now, isn't that interesting?
Taking just a couple seconds to decide this woman's fate, you shrug and wave a hand through the air, breathing out a little bit of silver mist after a quick bit of construction inside your inner domain.
"Here, hold your breath and open the door," you say, waving the gas mask before the glass. "Then you can put this on and you'll be safe."
The door rattles as something happens on the other side, the dirty blonde woman's eyes opened widely to stare at the piece of equipment you're offering her. Then it is yanked open violently, a clawing hand reaching for what you let go of easily.
"Haah, haah, haah," she breathes, apparently content to have escaped the gas leak for now.
"Well, if you're not going to remember much of anything, I'd suggest you make your way out of here and head up north," you tell her, gesturing for which way she should go. "Concord is open to everyone, though I'd suggest losing those clothes in favor of something more inconspicuous. They might some people the wrong impression, just so you know."
"Will do… Thanks," she leaves as she steadily stumbles her way along, likely having partially forgotten how to walk. It's an interesting tidbit, one that kind of reminds you about a few combat applications of Victor's power- that you are aware of, of course, having eaten him and all. He always took forever to get to the point his opponents couldn't do really simple things like that, of course, hence he rarely actually used this facet of his power, but similarities do exist.
Now then, little Miss Gunner over here will serve as an excellent long-term test case for how this gas affects it victims over time. You'll have someone or something check on her regularly, assuming she doesn't get herself eaten by anything on the way to Concord, which concludes your investment in her case- the supremely comfortable, self-adjusting clean rebreather mask will return to you in around twenty, thirty minutes and that's that.
Now, as for the gaseous weapons you're here for…
"Find me the laboratory in this building with the most intact database terminal," you demand, getting yourself an immaterial glowing trail of light to follow to your goal.
Because screw actually searching this whole company top to bottom. You are willing to take your time, but not that much time.
Invisiwave: Gas that renders those that breathe it in incapable of differentiating between inanimate objects and animate ones/living beings. May cause paranoia, as the furniture keeps moving. Easily takes effect, but has a short duration unless continually breathed in.
Irradicator: Gas that causes a chemical reaction leading to the ignition of air when subjected to high humidity and warm temperatures, such as inside a human respiratory system, leading to every breath burning quite literally. Causes 3d10 fire damage per turn to any unprotected living beings within the area of effect.
AmnesiGas: Gas that affects the mammalian brain's memory centers, progressively removing its ability to remember anything. Personal details, other people or objects, even the knowledge of how to perform some tasks may be randomly affected until the victim can do nothing but lie in a corner. This process can take up to several hours, however.
HalluciGen Gas: Gas that causes unprovoked aggression and outbursts of random violence when breathed in, leading to the affected attacking whatever living beings are in sight with whatever means that are at their disposal. Lasts for 2d3 turns once it is no longer actively being breathed in.
The temples were being cleaned, all petitioners doing their own small part to cast out what was before and prepare for the Coming of God. The ritual, for it could be described in no other word, proceeded apace, guided by nothing but each of its participants' faith and willingness to leave their lives behind themselves, become someone new in transcension all they had been.
Father Wales was quiet today, or tonight, for time was meaningless in this most holy of holy sites. How could he not be, surrounded by the intent worship and atmosphere surrounding their efforts, all culminating in this form of church service meant to signify the passing of life?
They were holding their own funerals, led by the servants of his mighty Lord, that none may be chained down by regret or thoughts of the past, when they had yet to find enlightenment. The veiled nuns were standing in small groups, surrounded by their own followers amongst the flock, to sing and play the solemn music he had never heard before yet knew, deep inside, to have been waiting for him all his life.
https/watch?v=h03yRFpbsk0
Father Wales repressed a lone tear. This was not a time to cry, whether in elation or otherwise! Instead, it was a time to celebrate, together, their elevation into the ranks of the Lord's servants, for every minute and every second was something to be thankful for.
Quietly clearing his throat, he stepped up to the altar, letting the power of the relic they had recovered in the wake of the Lord wash over himself. Such privilege it was, to be witness to this most holy of creations!
But he needed to speak, and to speak well, for though he was not qualified for it, others looked upon him for leadership and he refused to abandon even a single soul in need of succor.
"We have come together on this day, brothers and sisters in faith, to give thanks to our Lord for is tireless working of miracles," he said, finding his voice to carry far and wide in the halls of the Lord, regardless of how loud or quietly he spoke them. "For it is not in ourselves that we find enlightenment, but in one another. Thus is the teaching of our Lord."
""Thus our lord teaches,"" the believers nearby replied softly.
"For we have attained paradise, the promised land of no tomorrow. For the Lord saith there shall be no hunger and no thirst, no night or day, no suffering nor betrayal at the end of our road. The only ones that shall thus punish us are ourselves and that which we doubt and punish ourselves. Thus is the teaching of our Lord."
""Thus our lord teaches.""
"And those that have not yet found their way, we shall teach. For there is no peace without the sacrifice of life, but there shall be no life without peace. Thus we must guide the lost souls of our neighbours until they find their way and arrive next to us to bring an end to their lives and rebirths. Thus is the teaching of our Lord."
""Thus our lord teaches.""
Buddhism had been an incredible discovery for Father Wales, much as he had been aware there were many religions following many philosophies stranger to himself. However, having known peace and comfort for himself, true peace, in the knowledge that his Lord was there and would forever be, to bring together all the souls that could and would exist had brought him to a simple realization.
Many religions were right in part, only to forget and corrupt some of their teachings. It could not be helped- to err was only human, and there were things more human than religion, he had found.
But to forgive was divine, and his Lord was nothing if not divine. Father Simon Wales had learned to accept the teachings of others, to add them to his own knowledge and what it could mean.
"For to accept one another is the great virtue that eludes those of us yet blind, yet to find acceptance is one step to salvation. Whether we accept one another or banish them from this life, we do it not out of hatred nor hostility, but out of love. Thus is the teaching of our Lord."
""Thus our lord teaches.""
There truly was no greater gift, than to educate and guide. He thanked his Lord once again for choosing this humble, misguided preacher to spread His word and revelation.
Next up on your to-do list, once you've recovered the actually useful chemical formulas and production methods kept inside the lab mainframe currently behind a couple hallways full of lethal gas that you suspect may be a war crime in some dimensions, you have… A couple of things on the coast to inspect, more or less in the area right east of Concord in a straight line.
All the people you've eaten have have steadily added more and more little tidbits of knowledge on the lay of the land all over the Commonwealth, as most people born here don't actually leave and outsiders are more the exception than the norm, but most of the things you know are really just either common knowledge or else directly sucked out of the people you'd expect to actually know about them in some way.
Hence you're here now, having teleported yourself into the area, to look at the Museum of Witchcraft, right where Salem used to stand. Well, they had to put the history of the place somewhere to sucker tourists in, that's one of those constants of any human civilization… Though, given what you've seen of this dimension in particular, you have to admit you wouldn't at all be surprised if some of those 'witches' had actual supernatural abilities.
Then again, if they did, they'd totally have used them to not get burned at the stake, so probably not. Or if they did, they probably sucked.
Anyway, looking at the building from the outside, you see a lot of blood and dead bodies strewn all over the floor, indicating that you do know where the Gunners that were supposed to stop by the place temporarily if they were held up went.
Especially with the large, very much not human body prowling around, too. It's a deathclaw, of course, you recognize the shape easily enough. Looks like the clutch of eggs they were supposed to be transporting was found by its original 'owners', after all.
Well, time's-A-wasting.
A quick kick to force the doors open, a short but brutal fight and a new soul added to your 'Earth fallout' collection later, you're looking at the broken eggs a certain band of idiots obviously weren't transporting properly, or else trampled when they holed up in here and tried to not die horribly- yet another thing the Gunners as an organization just aren't very good at.
Of all of them, only one egg remain intact, cushioned by the rest of the scattered shells. Looks like there's one last survivor in here, unborn as it might be…
There you go, a brand-new heated habitat block to let the egg do its thing. You'll need to actually look into doing some genetic engineering on the unborn deathclaw later when you have the time- if nothing else, using it as a base will be a fun challenge.
Sure, this species' biology is basically 'reptilian murder machine on crack' anyway, but that just means you can have fun figuring out how to make it better. Or worse, if you're the type to be easily gnawed upon.
Hey, no judgement, if that's what you're into. Takes all kinds and all that.
For now though, all you do is extract a DNA sample via a scraping of the shell and throw it into the sequencer so you know what you're dealing with for later, then get right back to your day job. Or mini job or whatever it is you call wasting a bit of time on the side for minimal payoff because you have nothing better to do.
Longneck Lukowski's Cannery, run by one Theodore Collins, is your next stop. A the name implies, it was an old cannery packing up and preserving meat of all kinds before the war, and this guy is supposed to have gotten it back into working condition… Except lately, people that ate his canned meat seem to have found themselves getting sick, giving his product a bad reputation in the area.
Now you're always a fan of someone proving themselves to have a good head on their shoulders and making the best of what they have, so if this guy's legit, you can work with him, mainly by integrating him and his place into the Minutemen's whole operation. And if not, well, you can always just murder him for wasting your time.
And right now, it's actually looking pretty bad for him.
The cannery is more or less intact from the outside and even inside it's… not a complete trashheap at least, but the smell of bare, openly lying meat is almost cloying and as you find the proprietor you quickly find his shifty eyes to indicate a lot about his character you waste no time to confirm.
"Ah, uh, hello there, welcome to Longneck Lukowski's. We sell the best meat in the C-"
The basement, no one can find out about the ghouls, keeps the caps hidden
His deepest, darkest fears, as a look into said eyes reveals, are pretty clear on that, all in all… And a quick glance down confirms there's more to the basement than you'd think. "So… downstairs, is it?"
"Uh? I mean, there's a bit of a molerat infestation down there, came with the place when I first moved in, but-"
"No, no, i mean the ghouls," you drawl, watching as one of his eyes twitches, his breath halting- then he pulls a gun on you.
A pipe gun, that is. Now you just feel actively insulted.
"Okay, I don't know where you heard what from, but-"
Once again the man is interrupted; this time by you slapping the weapon out of his hands faster than he can possibly react, breaking at least one wrist in the process with a pleasingly sickening crunching, cracking noise.
"UAAARGH!"
You sigh. Some people, really…
"Don't be such a baby, this is nothing compared to the rest of your life," you wave his screams and lamentations off, summarily not paying any attention to either. Disabling his limbs with a few quick, crisp kicks, you then proceed to call in a bunch of robots to have this entire place looked over and fixed up, including whatever is wrong with the basement.
Not like a couple of ghouls can really hope to stop a squad of the things sweeping through or anything.
Well, if nothing else this particular asshat at least had the decency to fix up the machinery of this old cannery for you, much as you could just build something better than them somehow; it's not like you actually care all that much where the mirelurk meat from those ranches of yours ends up being processed and sold, at any rate.
Swiftly whisking the now unconscious (due to pain) Theodore Collins, as his name was according to a handful of second-hand mentions from various memories, off with you, you deliver him to Vault 111, your little collection of handy victims to be milked for a steady supply of blood coming along nicely. The Minutemen aren't going out of their way to take psychopathic raiders alive or anything, but the odd one or two of them does tend to not die immediately- obviously only to end up with you down in your subterranean domicile.
Strapping your newest permanent guest into his own pod, the irony of him selling tainted canned meat only to become what's essentially canned meat himself is not lost on you. Turns out that sometimes, karma can be such a bitch.
Technically, that'd mean it'd be coming after you, perhaps, but you'd like to believe that you've amply proven by this point you are not one to be fucked with; instead, you often do the fucking. Or perhaps all the atrocities and such you're committing left and right are simply the karmic evening of the scales in the first place, what with your crappy parents and all.
You certainly feel you could pay the world at large back for their existence a few times over yet. Note to self, make sure to fuck your mother in the ass when you're back on Bet, just to make the point as clearly as possible.
But as for now… Getting back to the coast area you've been working through today, you quickly fly over to the very edge of the water in short order. There, in and around the Kingsport Lighthouse, you can reporedly find a local chapter of the Children of Atom.
Now then, a quick dust-off and a rough estimation of their numbers later- and what the fuck are they even doing with a feral ghoul up there- you approach the place openly, quickly being noticed by the men and women dressed in predominantly green rags. "Hello there! Have you heard of our lord and saviour the-"
'The Fucknutsaidwhat' is what you were about to say, but the actions taken by these particular fanatics surprise even you for a split moment, enough for their energy projectiles to hit you head-on.
"Blessings of Atom be with you!" Several of them are pointing their little pistols at you, clearly meant to fire something other than bullets, given the little satellite dishes instead of muzzles, but you really didn't quite expect to be bombarded with glowing green blobs of, you presume, radiation. They slam into you, no actual physical force behind them, but you suspect if you had a Geiger Counter on you, it would be ticking like crazy now.
You repress the urge to sigh at these people. Again.
It has to be said that, of all your many ways to murder a person, guzzling down their blood and stealing their soul is and remains your most favorite one. This should not be a surprise, it basically is for you what eating and drinking is for a living organism, all told, regardless of the added fun of the food still wriggling and squirming a bit.
That said, there are many ways in which you can facilitate this when out in the field and as opposed to, say, just ramming your teeth into tied-up prisoners. The old standby, of course, remains to walk up to them, grab them in an appropriate place and treat them like a juice pack on the fly- teeth in to work as straws, juice out. That said, you've since made it somewhat of a little game to find ever more creative ways to initiate this whole process, seeing as your victims sure aren't helping you keep it fun by themselves.
The classic would of course be to drop on to your unsuspecting prey from above or launch yourself at them from stealth. Some of your earliest meals were essentially that and it usually worked out well for you. You can stun them ahead of time, crippling or disabling them somehow, and then just treat whatever group you're going at like a buffet. And then of course there's the wonderful world of extreme sports food, where you use your esper power and your telekinesis to forcefully drag them towards yourself to be devoured.
Honorable mention goes to using magical powers or spells to render them incapable of resisting or even come to you by themselves, the power of Domination in particular being of great aid to you in this regard, and convincing them to feed themselves to you of their own free will.
The reason you're currently going on this massive tangent, of course. are the Children of Atom you're absolutely butchering right now, mentally going through all of these categories one by one to match your methods to them. The lighthouse becomes a deathtrap regardless of the feeble attempts at fighting back and so it all you can do to keep yourself entertained and well-practiced.
Hey, not your fault they only really use those radiation rays and even these radiation grenades a few of them try throwing at you- in vain, utterly and completely. Even if you weren't pretty much immune to all but the worst flares of the stuff when it starts to cook the air, your aura would still protect you from their feeble weaponry, at least for a time.
So you rush 'em, you slice 'em and you dice 'em, you surprise 'em and you throw them around like ragdolls, not interested in keeping your feeding even mildly quieted right now like you did back during your early beginnings on Earth Bet. Back when things such as guns could actually threaten you, much as you made it a point to avoid giving anyone hostile-looking anything approaching to a clear shot.
The lighthouse and the ramshackle huts built into a small crater nearby, heavily irradiated of course, are cleaned of the cult in short order. And the ghoul, actively glowing with green light and stuffed into the signal fire contraption (You aren't a lighthouse expert, okay?) is captured and put into your biolabs as a mildly notable sample while you're at it, too.
It's pretty much just a feral ghoul, just… glowing. And actively radiating radiation. It's worth looking into, at least.
Replacing the manufactories you have active all over the place should be kind of a no-brainer, now that you have a better variant to use that just works so much better (illogically so), but producing all the necessary parts actually took a bit of time, even once you used the first one you finished to replicate them a bunch of times. In addition to this, synthesizing the Eldritch Cores that go with them as a matter of course was, in itself, an exercise in mild patience, hence it's about half a day after your most notable recent breakthrough (and perhaps the greatest one to date, in fact) that you finally get right down to it and make the switches.
One manufactory produces metal ingots of every kind on demand, with a bunch of samples on hand. Another one takes the dozen or so of them you get for every one you should be getting and just reforms them into different ingots- again somewhere between ten to a dozen on average.
That's right, you've set up a metal factory. That produces metal. Out of smaller quantities of metal.
You took approximately half an hour to get over your cackling once you got it all operational, for all that the process of building these things was a pain and a half before you had functionally unlimited resources to work with.
Vault 111 and your biological research center towards its east both receive around two dozen of these little marvels of science (no matter how much certain detractors demand you don't call them that on account of being unscientific), most of which remain in the center of your power under Sanctuary; it's a simple matter of not needing all too many of them over there as opposed to over here and they all can do anything any of the others can, so it's mostly a matter of mass production at this point.
Speaking of mass production, much the same treatment is lavished upon the robot factory and the manufactories churning away within its depths. You estimate a significant increase in production, now that you can just recycle and number of your robots to turn them into several of their type with only a bit of time. Sure, the bigger and more complicated, the longer this takes, but Isabel has already started trials to see if taking extra time to first take them apart and then put the added materials into another manufactory won't end up being more efficient in terms of productivity after all.
You have complete faith she will succeed in her mission to make you even more immensely powerful than you already are.
Oh, and Concord's old manufactory modle is also being replaced by the new one, of course. Never let it be said that you're the kind of management that just never replaces anything until it breaks and sometimes not even that; that kind of corporate culture can fuck right off, you keep everything up-to-date and functioning perfectly.
At least, any company equipment supplied to your employees or subsidiaries. Though you do go and let Preston know you switched the manufactory out for a better model you finished and to let you know if it spits out anything inappropriate as well as to ensure the safety of the machine even more than he already did because hey, it just occurred to anyone that knows about them would totally try to steal an Eldritch Manufactory.
They're basically an easy way to print just about anything imaginable. Huh. You actually went and established the groundwork for a post-scarcity society on the side.
Goes to show just how good you are at this, you guess.
It may come as a mild surprise to some that Salem, the region as such, is largely under your control by now… Not so, however, the city of Salem, which is really just a mild issue in how you approach this whole 'conquering the wasteland' thing, that is, slowly and inefficiently without much interest in holding the areas you've taken on account of the lack of really any serious opposition against you.
Eh, it's just kind of how things developed. You can get into properly taking advantage of your actions later, you already have a meeting arranged with everyone involved in this stuff before the crack of dawn later on, in the meantime you have (nearly) all night to play around a little more first.
Anyway, Salem. You're pretty much angling to take over the entirety of the Commonwealth north of the northernmost parts of what's left of Boston, which means this heap of rubble gets to be cleansed and improved upon by your humble self. However, as you stroll through the suspiciously empty streets of the one place in America that was so hard up for anything noteworthy about it it went and make a big brouhaha about killing a bunch of random women for daring not to suck of a priest or something, you quickly come to a realization.
One, there's, like, nobody around. Two, instead it's a something, or rather several somethings; mirelurks, buried in the muck built by over the years and lying free in some parts of the area in small, clustered groups.
Naturally, this bears investigation… Or it would, if you didn't have an expert on their everything on hand.
Salem was drowning in a flood the likes of which it had never seen even after the sudden climate shift caused by the megaton nuke going off so very close to it, relatively speaking, but it was not a flood of water this time; its new inhabitants, the many mirelurks lurking within it, were leaving it one by one, being dissolved into gnarly clouds of bugs dispersing in all directions in quick succession without ever disturbing the rest of their kind nearby.
One lone man was chased around by insects, finally captured and explained to that Salem was now part of the Minutemen's protection by an unsettling series of inhuman sounds made all around him as he was carried back to his basement bunker from whence he had fled for some inconceivable reason.
As for the cause of this new phenomenon, Taylor Hebert was receiving her Gabriel-mandated dosage of head pats and intimacy, silently leaning against his form and covertly feeling up his abs with one hand amidst the quiet rooftop they had chosen to abscond to.
This was fine. It was very fine.
Bunker Hill is one of those war monuments that managed to stick around through the apocalypse and is even now of some actual importance; although people that even know what this stone obelisk embodies are few and far between these days (not to mention those that actually care even if they do), the place was actually well-positioned over the past few decades to serve as a sort of trading hub between caravans that make their routes through the Commonwealth and move wares from one place to the next to buy and sell with a profit.
Basically, traders. The Hill's east of Diamond City in one of the outer parts of Boston's ruins, kept relatively clear of hazards by the raiders that are being paid off by them to keep their hands off of the caravans and, indirectly, push out anything else that might decide to murder them for fun.
It's a sort of synergistic relationship, but even so these people do have to defend themselves properly, hence the thriving demand for mercenaries hired for protection and the fortifications erected around what is arguably the most important focal point of trade in the Commonwealth at this point in time.
You're told the location is quite defensible and you can see it, you suppose, on the basis of how normal people have to consider this kind of thing. Well, at least they're more or less sane and don't just shoot anyone that comes close.
Actually negotiating with these people is a tad bit complicated, as it's not like the traders are some kind of unanimous monolith of opinion that will do whatever any of them agrees to, but you can talk to the ones that are present to exchange wares and information at least, and impress upon the couple that more or less permanently hang out around Bunker Hill to maintain it and its amenities (for a price paid by the people that use them, of course) the importance of what you are saying, which is good enough for your purposes, really.
The deal is really simple, all in all. The Minutemen are looking to trade a lot of stuff on the regular, these people are the kinds that trade for a living. Add that the raiders that are cutting into their profits can be disposed of and any caravans moving around within Minutemen territory be kept protected at a fraction of the cost, the agreements basically make themselves- as long as Bunker Hill's traders don't fuck around and do anything grossly illegal, everyone stands to profit.
And you, of course, stand to expand your influence further through them, but you don't expect these people to have any concept of indirect cultural influencing aimed at co-opting entire populations with greater ease. Not their fault the next closest thing they could think of if aware of your long-term plans would be some bloody warlord massacring anyone in disagreement to subjugate an entire region.
Granted, that's still part of your plan, but if you can just peacefully take everything over, you're all for it. Slaughtering all your food at once may be a lot of fun and get you a big feats, but you don't intend to starve because you were too stupid to properly manage your humans or something.
Anyway, thing are looking good with getting these mercantile actors to cooperate and you get them to give you a list of raider gangs and their nests as they're aware of them at the moment. Just so you can have those cleaned up and/or eaten, you haven't decided yet.
At no point does anyone approach you about the Railroad or even drops subtle hints meant to get you curious, despite the connections you know the 'secret' organization had with Bunker Hill. Looks like they're either appropriately careful or else the Railroad has already begun being forgotten, buried by the weight of time and general disregard.
Whatever will those poor, poor synths do now that there's no hope for their freedom. And more importantly, who gives a fuck? You're arguably doing way worse than the Institute back in Vault 111 and it's not like you've ever decided to grow a conscience over any of it.
Yes, that is a dig at a particular soul you ate once. Some people just deserve to be mocked even after death.
Anyway, speaking of Vault 111, you're taking a short pit stop back home before you make your way around to your little meeting still at your local 'summer home' in this dimension, but above ground; few things go over a freshly pressed glass of blood or two and a bit of horrible supernatural soul torture that actually lets you get something useful out of your subjects.
Being a vampire is all about (un)living in style.
You sit down in your designated seat, your big, comfy chair just as big and comfy as any of the others around the big round table arranged in the middle of the meeting room you usually use for this kind of thing. Attendance is deliberately light for this gathering, as you'd need a considerable amount of additional time just to deal with Cupcake's antics if she were to be around for this.
You do not need everyone being blown sky-high every half an hour. It's fun when you do it in a setting where you don't then need to actively rebuild everything and check everyone over for actual, permanent-until-healed wounds, quite the opposite otherwise.
Instead there's only yourself, as the actual brains of this whole operation and let nobody tell you otherwise, Preston, as your catspaw, Nora, as someone marginally interested in how this whole thing shakes out and Taylor and Isabel largely just present as observers and to give their opinions if they're required.
What with being the currently greatest weapon of mass destruction and the foremost expert on developments with your robot armies are concerned and all.
Kate wasn't really interested in this whole thing, of course, being a woman of action over deep thought at the best of times, so you just set her and Cait up with some mild target practice in Boston where the number of supermutants running around just never seems to abate despite their inability to really reproduce in any way. Meanwhile, Curie has enough to do with her research and just plans to investigate the psychological impacts of the decisions you're making here and have made in the past are affecting the people living within your sphere of influence.
In other words, she's penciled 'people watching' into her personal itinerary. Hey, her decision, even if you doubt she'll find much of interest. People can be distressingly dull and boring once you've seen enough of them.
Anyway, here you are. Time to get this show on the road. "Okay everyone, let's start. I have called this meeting, in case you weren't aware, to plan out the next steps for the Minutemen and the rebuilding of the Commonwealth as a whole. For a start, let's take a look at where we stand and what we have achieved so far, shall we?"
Preston's face falls, a sigh threatening to break out of his lips. "You do know I don't know every detail you likely want to know off the back of my head? Why can't we just do this in Concord where I have entire ledgers filled?"
"Because that would be no fun and I can just teleport them over any time they're needed," you say, snapping a finger while secretly tapping your phone to make Preston's most current logbook appear before him- you went out of your way to sneak into his office and mark it just to do this one trick.
You're having fun in here, yes, how'd you know?
So, the Minutemen. Recruitment has been more or less steady for a while, but tapered off a little lately, the most eager young people willing to go out and shoot stuff in the name of world peace or whatever they're told you're doing drying up for the most part. That's not to say there's no fresh volunteers anymore, of course, just that there's significantly less of them now than there were, say, a week or two ago.
That still leaves a good number of them currently occupied with training, patrolling and public relations often all rolled into one; by Preston's latest count, there's just over 1.5 thousand of them, significantly more combatants than just about any other faction around out in the open within the Commonwealth at large right now and almost enough to rival the Minutemen themselves in their heyday.
You know, when they already started hemorrhaging manpower and slowly dying.
This doesn't sound like much considering the literally tens of thousands of combat-oriented robots alone you're accumulating at all times now that you don't have any reason not to build them nonstop, but considering the population density he had to work with, Preston's actually been doing pretty well- and more importantly, his efforts have found approval among the population at large, even those that don't actually join up.
The Minutemen are and remain more a public face, in the context of your organization here. The number disparity to and relative expendability of your robots ensures as much.
In other news, efforts to actually keep the areas you have 'freed' so far have been proceeding as well, limited hands being weighed up with the robotic helpers you give them. A normal patrol usually consists of one to two Minutemen riding on one of the ST33D bots or riding a TORPID accompanied by around twenty Hammers and one SP1D3R to bring up the firepower, though they have been organized into a flexible force capable of reacting to any new developments as they happen, whether by combining smaller groups to destroy raider gangs creeping into Concord's vicinity or building a somewhat larger group of actual humans to better talk and judge on a human level.
It's important, that kind of thing. Your robots can fight like nobody's business, but they aren't the most empathetic of your creations to date, to say the least.
And it does say something, given your track record.
Right now, Concord is experiencing a sort of crappy renaissance, with people actually experiencing a break from the constant struggle for survival that is the rest of the Commonwealth for them, by and large. People are reading in the generously opened library, children and even adults are taking basic courses in the Concord University, as it's been named since, buying and selling things and actively thinking up ways to use their skills and abilities to make money, despite the free housing and food provided to all.
In other words, your half-baked bag of ideas worked out better than you'd have expected, honestly. You'd have already considered it a success to not have to beat down open anarchy or rebellion or anything.
Domestically, you're doing quite well on food production right now; having followed your instructions, the Minutemen have opened up an additional two mirelurk ranches and staffed them with volunteers using equipment produced by the manufactory you left at Concord for just such an occasion. Adding the prototype molerat farms and the crops being farmed throughout the wasteland using a handful of more volunteers and copious amounts of your specialized farming robots, you could legitimately consider yourself the perhaps richest group in miles around measured in the availability of food.
Water is even less of a problem, of course. Actual 'clean' water just falling from the sky may appear like a miracle to the local population, but even without any rain catchers to make use of the occasional drizzle you have enough water purifiers standing around and pumping water into your population center to keep them all hydrated without any big issues.
Should your current water sources run dry, you can always just start to siphon the ocean water through a treatment plant or something.
The largest issue right now, by contrast, is really that… of jobs. You have several thousand people sitting in Concord, exact numbers not really as interesting for this discussion as the fact that… There's just not enough jobs to be done.
Simply put, the amount of workers you really need to sustain your population is so small that the rest of them, not actually required for this, don't have any real work. There's some extent to which this is being buffered by the needs now cropping up around Concord- services, specialist work such as carpenting or repairmen, that kind of thing- but even that only goes so far.
An estimated third of the people flocking to the promise of safety and free food therefore don't have any regular jobs; emphasis on regular as odd jobs and the like aren't counted here. There's apparently a kind of neighbourhood watch that also helps keep the sewers clean of any giant bugs or the like, too, but that's mostly because you just didn't think to station any robots down there so far.
That's really the main problem. You can very much just automate a vast majority of just about anything that doesn't involve talking to people, leaving a very limited selection of possible jobs to choose from for meaty inhabitants of Gabetopia.
Well, at least taking over the northern Commonwealth is going well, as you already mentioned. Sectioning the map off into smaller bits to handle it easier, you make sure everyone is on the same page before proceeding.
M1-M9, ladies and gentlemen. Cower before your geological genius.
Going through them, M1, M2 and M3 are well in hand by now, with no notable threats remaining and a thin presence of Minutemen stretching all across it. The settlements and facilities you have brought under your control and slash or built are about as safe as can be and public order actually exists in the area.
M7, filled up by both the Castle, where Preston's people maintain a constant presence and vigilance, and the robot factory from which Isabel regularly sends small armies of robots to chase any enemies away with is also… relatively clear. There's, like, one settlement in the northern half of the coast area with enough ground to stand on, but no real threats really have any time to dig in, either, thanks to the disparate forces' disconnected campaigns in the same sector.
That leaves M8 as far as your real control is concerned… Which is either a glowing radioactive hellscape or a lush forest slowly being tamed by Woodward. Everyone is just best staying away from there, crazy cultists notwithstanding.
That leaves M4, the Fort Hagen region named after the strategically most important structure in it, M5 and M9 where you have little to no presence, whereas M6, the center of Boston, is kind of an odd case; though Diamond City is working for you in all but name, the ruins' dense population of all kinds of dangers leaves its exact status kind of up in the air.
Up to now, the Minutemen have essentially just been securing borders and hunting down threats within them, esentially, methodically securing the northern third of the Commonwealth. They will likely keep on doing so, too, but that doesn't mean you can't have them begin to range out further afield regardless of the meat they've been bringing back.
A good two third of them are still in training, anyway, being drilled by the moderately more skilled instructors Pretson chose for this role and rotated back and forth due to the lack of said qualified personnel. May as well have them go on relatively low-danger missions and tasks such as keeping the home coast clear while the better trained ones look into slowly oozing down south or something.
Taking the big issues and concerns one at a time, your little council considers the first of them in full, making sure you're working with the full facts here.
Unemployment is an ugly word and it doesn't even really apply here, at least not in the way it is often thought of in more modern settings. It's not like you absolutely need everyone to have a job or society breaks down; if anything, you could totally just cut out the human component entirely and just use robots for literally everything actually important.
But that would kind of defeat the purpose of rebuilding civilization and shifting this little post-scarcity society of yours over into a completely new mode of living is a challenge you take one look at and shake your head immediately. It'd just be way too much work to be really worth it, at least in the short term, so finding ways to keep people busy by themselves it is.
To this end, you all put your heads together to come up with several measures that should, hopefully, increase the amount of open jobs and consequently allow anyone that wants to work for a living to do so. The central concept you and Nora quickly decide on is essentially just a subsidy of new startup enterprises, having the Minutemen give out interest-free loans to anyone that can justify the investment in terms of making more money and hiring people with the cash they're given.
You could couch it as 'encouraging innovation' or 'removing low-cash flow inhibitions', but that's pretty much it. This way anyone should in theory be able to source funds to start up their own business, if they want. The specifics are of course a lot more complicated- rates of repayment and loan sizes and categories and penalties for failing to pay the money back at all- but that sums the idea as such up.
Then there's the additional suggestions. For one, Brahmin, the mutated, hairless, two-headed cattle that made it to the common day, may as well be kept much like mirelurks are in their own ranches- if anything, they'd be much, much easier to manage than the omnicidal shellfish. Beyond that, the most notable idea that came to anyone present was to basically make it easier to find short term, temporary work as such, essentially make the already existing process easier to access if you can't just snap your fingers to summon stable work.
It's actually a really good idea Taylor had. You'll need to brush her hair later to express your appreciation, in fact.
It basically ends up being a sort of request board, except better organized. Essentially a separate building of its own, staffed with its own employees, to mediate between people willing to pay to see something done and those willing to do it for pay.
All vetted and more or less legal, of course, within the bounds of the law as it is actually put into practice around here. With money paid in deposit and handed out after the job is confirmed complete. It's a tad barebones, but it's still better than modern unemployment agencies and thus meets your minimum standards to pass acceptance.
By contrast, the question of subjugating assimilating the rest of the Commonwealth is a lot simpler- and also a lot more difficult to find answers to. On the one hand, you could basically trigger a mass offensive all over the Commonwealth if you wanted, using waves of robots directed, when needed, by your human minions trained as part of the minutemen and of at least somewhat less questionable loyalty.
On the other hand, you could just use your newfound functionally infinite resources to just create more and more robots and simply overrun everything everywhere with them forever. In this case, it would be perfectly fine to just have them keep on training, perhaps even have your robots take over the whole patrol duties more extensively to focus on the task of getting themselves the fuck ready.
For what? Who knows. You just want them to be ready.
And yes, that is what you eventually end up deciding to do. Their potential use in your plans for expansion are simply too small compared to their use as a domestic peacekeeping force- you'll just treat them as a sort of community-oriented police with heavy ordinance.
Hence you will remain with the option of making them run laps and fire at practice targets all day. For good measure you even go and create several bodies for Carmilla to inhibit, the loyal minion ready and willing to whip the Minutemen into shape and back again repeatedly.
Any particularly outstanding Minutemen are also to be trained in additional tasks and granted separate ranks to denote them, stuff like scouts and snipers that requires actual dedicated training.
Most of all of the things you're doing would be pretty simple and straightforward to implement by themselves, but you're doing a lot of stuff all at once and need to tighten up things in Concord anyways, so you get down to brass tacks and start to properly organize… Well, everything.
It was about high time someone did. Preston tries, bless his heart, but the scale of what he has to work with is simply too far beyond what just about anyone local to this dimension's current time period is used to.
Hocker walked around a little more, anxiously looking up at the announcement someone'd put all over the wall. He'd been doing that for an hour already, his fingers doing that thing where they poked at the seams of his jacket.
He stuffed his hands into his pockets again. He should probably just keep them in there.
Nothing in for it. He'd just need to go inside and talk to someone about the thing his reading comprehension (funny word, that) had half-implied from the words written on that wall already.
He could hear a bunch of movement behind the walls around the building he was looking at. That probably meant they were open? Though they were supposed to always be open anyway.
Opening the well-oiled door to the Minutemen HQ, Hocker took a look around, sighting the couple of them that were seemingly always hanging around inside. "Hey there, what's up?" One of them asked, waving him over.
So he came towards him. "H-hello," he said, swallowing. "I'm here about that, that new thing?"
"Mhm, you mean the free loans?" The older man asked, casually leaning against some kind of desk and thumbing over pieces of paper. "You know 'bout how they're supposed to work?"
"I-I suggest a thing, and you tell me whether I'll g-get a loan to try it out. I think." Why couldn't he stop doing the thing, dammit.
"'Bout right. There's a couple checks for the really big loans and all, but the smaller ones are pretty lenient. So what's your name, sonny, and what do you want to do?"
"I-I'm Hocker, and I want to start a kn-knitting thing. Where people come together and…" He mimed the action of knitting, flushing at just how bad he was at this.
"Huh, I could see that working out if you manage to sell whatever you make. Handmade stuff is supposed to get extra attention 'cause of how many people like it these days. Figures soon as they get brand new everything, they'd look back at how everything was before, eh?" The man gave Hocker a crooked grin and pulled out a paper, a form, he thought as they'd be called when they were meant to… Yeah. "Tell you what, kid, you seem like the honest type, so I'll trust ya not to run away with the caps. Let's see what we can do, yeah?"
Half an hour later, Hocker was carrying a small sack of 500 caps and staring at everything around him with wide eyes. And trying not to hyperventilate.
500 caps! That was more than… Than a lot! He'd also have to show that slip of paper to a place and he'd get a small part of a building for his idea. And then he'd have to figure out where to hide the cash and what he'd need to get started.
Not hyperventilating was getting harder.
Back inside your inner world and possessed of a bit of time to work with, now that it's been distended towards your purposes, you waste none of it and get to implementing all the new science and 'science' you have access to these days.
Specifically, you work on updating a few old crowd favorites. You have worked out several basic weapons making use of whatever fancy technology you last stole from somewhere, finding them to be of great use in the hands of your minions and even your robots, in the case of the Hammers, but now that you have literally infinite sources of energy to work with and some more idea of what you're doing, you can make a few marked improvements to the whole concept of 'shoot glowy stuff at enemy'.
That is, make them shoot more glowy stuff. You have energy blasts as you reverse-engineered from that alien technology, but you kept in a separate firing mode to also propel ionized matter at things and, essentially, make it explosively react with anything it hit and basically turn everything into free-flowing atoms for a few short moments.
Technically a chemical weapon, but as long as it screws up what it's pointed at, who really even cares?
That said, you can now do better. By combining the two into one! No longer shall there be separate firing modes of any sort, instead just a glorious single highly energetic blast of power that both atomizes and disintegrates targets! This both increases damage and lets it eat through just about any matter you can think think of off the top of your head- and probably quite a few more kinds.
The sheer destructive potential of these weapons is astounding. And makes you just a little giddy, too.
No, seriously, these things will be able to just ignore pretty much any defense that doesn't rely on somehow keeping the fired energy from making contact, or perhaps some exotic kinds of protection might still work, you don't pretend to be all-knowing or anything. Still, the vast majority of hazards should be 'removable' with so much as a simple little energy pistol.
You already know what all your kids get as a first birthday present.
Anyway, taking aside all of the surprisingly intricate engineering that goes into making a sufficiently rugged piece of equipment that's actually reliable and won't break down or clog up the first time it gets wet and even the playful wrestling you partake it when Yoshi can't take it anymore and tries to stop you from cramming the equivalent of a low-kiloton nuke into a handheld device like these guns (and turrets, for that matter, can't forget them), you also get to the other big thing you stole from aliens aside from their weapons.
Personal inertial cancelers, huh? Well, time to show 'em how to use a loophole in the way these things work to use them as personal forcefield projectors instead.
Suck on that, disappointingly unsexy living beings. Yes, you're still on that.
Anyway, while they can't hold up gases or light, because either would be somewhat counterproductive for most users, your new and improved forcefields do protect against just about most other things still. Physical force, whether transmitted through solids, gases or liquids, is stopped by them, though a sufficiently powerful blow can and would still throw the field and its contents around, just mostly unharmed.
Also works against surprise electric currents, heat, most kinds of hazardous materials, and the things even come in different colors for good measure. The unfortunate tendency to burn out when overloaded still applies, but by the time that happens, you typically should have other concerns already anyway.
You just made it harder for that to happen overall. Ultimately, all it takes is the wearing of a few small pieces of machinery, meant to be clipped on over the arms and legs and around the stomach, a small on/off switch on the last one, and you can just surround yourself with what amounts to a thin film of extra protection layered over your body.
There's a fancy marketing phrase there, you know it. You just also aren't exactly looking to sell these, so you don't search it out.
All Inertial Suppression technology has been replaced by Forcefield technology
Prydwen Upgrades
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. X3
6 Points: Assimilation Drive: Using a mix of mechashift technology and your patented gravity tech, the Prydwen can simply scoop up entire areas of land and anything upon then, drawing them into itself to be taken apart or assimilated as they are. Allows the harvesting of resources on enormous scales.
10 Points: Labyrinth Pathways: The Prydwen's sheer size continues to be an issue for logistic of all kinds, but there are ways to mitigate the issue further. By making parts of its structure all but identical, you can allow anyone that enters specific tunnels or doors exit at another tunnel or door that lies at the floating city's other end entirely. Nothing feels out of place when using this feature, however, making it almost distressingly mundane and unremarkable in practice.
2 Points: Eldritch Energies: Put a bunch of Eldritch Cores all over the Prydwen to supply it with all the energy it needs. Also included in this are Eldritch Manufactories and everything needed to get their number growing, if slowly.
4 Points: Forcefield: Just switch that one inertial suppression field out for a proper forcefield, you're sure nobody will notice that… Even if it requires a surprising amount of architecture modification due to changed specifications. (Still discounted option)
8 Points: Superweapon: A single, enormous weapon incorporating your newest 'fuck this place in particular' technology, the entire habitat block dedicated to it can be moved around like the rest to allow flexible firing on any desired targets. Causes wide-area devastation and may be fired up to thrice in quick succession before it begins to break reality so bad it cannot be used anymore. May randomly scramble the laws of physics in small ways temporarily in and around the impact zone.
1 Point: Resort Space: Remember to reserve a good couple blocks' worth of space to build a resort into for you and your brides. Important priorities, that.
Your current big pet project is coming along nicely. All it takes are a few revisions, changes, additions… Ad you have it just about where and how you want it, even if navigating the halls within may or may not become somewhat difficult for any simple mortal unused to thinking in more than three dimensions.
Ah well, they'll get used to it. Or just take the transport pods everywhere. You do offer alternatives to just figuring out the interconnected maze you made out of Project Prydwen.
Speaking of, however, it's not actually that any longer. No, from this day and henceforth, it shall be known as Titan, the floating city, or the Titan or however you want to call it.
It isn't done quite yet, the thousands of extremely efficient robots you have set to the task of making your desires come true working nonstop and reinforced by more of their number every hour and even so not done as of this time, but the Titan has already taken shape, the enormous complex of machinery and walls upon walls spreading as far as the eye can see.
They've been at it ever since you first envisioned this project and what it could and eventually should become, so that much isn't any big surprise, at the very least. Progress has been consistently at the level you would expect from your creations. All it takes now are the finishing touches and the few retrofits you need done, then the Titan can rise into the sky for the first time, the original frame of the Prydwen little more than a faded memory at this point.
You can hardly await the moment. Partially because this thing is just very, very big and you've been running out of space to expand it into; the Titan's bulk ranges from Sanctuary to Concord, almost, and although you managed to just redirect a lot of the growth of the schematics away from anything inconvenient to place it further out towards the west, it has been an issue.
… You kind of wonder what the people think. A project of this size was absolutely impossible to meaningfully keep hidden from the start, at least without enormous amount of time, effort and resources, so you never really tried, but still…
Well, the Titan is visible from Concord's wall easily and just not that far from the city itself. People obviously noticed. Ah well, not like it matters- the joys of living in a Gabrielcracy, where you rule as an absolute ruler. It's honestly a much better form of government than most, as you are both immortal and posessed of effectively infinite resources and all.
It's not often that you take a couple of hours just to sit down with a few others and shoot the shit, piss in the breeze or whatever other mildly offensive turn of phrase one wants to apply to hanging out with one another.
Hence there you are, you, Kate and Nora sitting in comfortable recliners with a glass of blood in one hand and your respective weapons in the other, taking turns to fire at the far-off city of Boston whenever anything objectionable dares to move across your field of view. You're relaxing at the side of that one river, just abusing immensely enhanced vampire senses and the extreme levels of accuracy each of you can achieve when you really want to.
"You know, I still remember when we were just a couple thugs with an attitude," Kate says after blowing the head off of some raider on a wrecked ship standing in the water. "I mean, we still are over on Bet, but it used to be that a dozen shitheads with guns were still an issue."
"Oh yeah, same," you chuckle to yourself, "before the whole gun immunity became a thing. I used to just sneak around everywhere and exclusively eat people that weren't expecting it. Good times."
Nora, cradling her pregnant belly, smiles fondly at both of you. "I feel like I was blessed to get that one right from the start. Though Gabriel used to lose his clothes all the time back then, too."
"He's our eye candy, it's his job," Kate jokes at her in response.
"Don't even get me started on that. Do you know how many clothes I went through back then? Not to mention how hard it was to just go up to people and brutalize them. Dead lifting dump trucks is one of the best powers I have."
"Eh, arguable," Kate shrugs, but doesn't elaborate. Fair enough.
You raise an arm, Last Embrace at the ready. There goes the raider with power armor, sporting a big fat hole and falling into the water.
Nora takes a sip from her blood before she takes her turn to survey the area through her sniper rifle, that particular mode of her weapon engaged as soon as you started your little picnic here. A kilometer or two into the distance, a supermutant loses its upper body, exploding into a gory mess.
"How do you even do that? Your projectiles aren't-"
"It's all a matter of technique," she waves you off. "And a bit of luck, but mostly technique. Would you hand me the refreshments, dear?"
Jeez, she knows exactly you'll do whatever she asks when she talks to you like that. "Here you go." You hand her another glass of fresh blood while Kate takes her turn again.
It's a peaceful day today, too. You close your eyes and just enjoy as yet another death is announced by the whistling of a railgun-propelled bullet shooting through the air.
Life is pretty great sometimes. You just hold Kate and Nora's hands for a moment.
These satellite relays have been somewhat of an old hat for you for a while now, ever since you first received the schematics for the Institute's teleporters (undoubtedly not as good as their own current versions, but it's not like you cared back then nor do you care now, you did just improve on them after all), just because they allowed you to easily and reliably expand their range.
You don't really need that anymore. With the technology you have since stolen, integrated and slash or modified to suit your needs, you have such extreme range for your teleportation you don't really have to care about the signal relay the satellite dishes offer you; the increase is so miniscule it i simply not worth the bother.
Maybe if you had access to the other side of the earth you'd seriously consider it, just to ensure signal strength is as even and reliable as possible. As it is, though, you're really only here and working on the last of them in person because you can't help but want to. The Commonwealth didn't have the full number of these stations before you came, but at least all that remained for long enough are being made operational again, incidentally also making it much easier to broadcast radio signals from one end of of Massachusetts to the other.
Not trivial or anything, but easier. You have to take what you can get sometimes.
So you go, and so you do. You don't usually waste much time personally working on your projects anymore, but just this one time you're having the Bobs you command make some space for a few quick claw applications as you go about replacing parts, maintaining ones still serviceable and generally getting this entire place back into working condition.
And if coming too close with an unprotected head may cause some mild headaches or nausea in baseline humans, that's hardly an issue, now is it? Especially as you go out of your way to mark the location as hazardous on your maps shared with the Minutemen.
So it's completely fine the machinery you put in there also causes insanity, bleeding from eyes, noses and ears, exploding heads, night terrors and hallucinations through extended exposure. After all, anyone that knows what's up should know better than to stay in the area for any length of time.
Now if only you could figure out how that even happened…
Is it just you or are you just way too fucking amazing? Not to brag, but everything you do you succeed at lately. Makes you wonder when the other shoe's going to drop.
Of course jamming your Eldritch Cores into technology to see what happens isn't limited to satellite arrays and manufactories, much as doing so already proves just how invaluable they are as both an advance in physics-breaking science and a technology to be used, which has you draw up a few preliminary plans and call upon your vampires currently in the same dimension as yourself.
After all, you do pride yourself in the individualized weapons you supply to them, so what better subject than those to make further changes using those Cores of yours? Naturally you only do so after making sure they'll work as intended using a few test weapons and asking them about it, but that's it.
In short order, Kate, Nora and Taylor's weapons sport their own technically unlimited power sources, becoming capable of firing for literally however long they may want. Of the three, Kate was the only one so far to have ever needed to reload as such, her propensity for shooting things actually using up considerable amount of her old superior fusion core, but that's not even the best part of this, of course; all of them have gained the same disintegrating energy projectile scheme you already implemented in the new generation of your other weapons, for a start.
Yes, this means all three are even more deadly now, but that's just the parts you actively worked on, before accounting for the other enhancements brought on by the use of the new Cores.
Kate's case is simple enough. Her weapon has gained the ability to split off into several copies of itself that are literally just the same weapon, with all the parts and weight and functionality you'd expect, just more of them. This combined with her ability to actually control them telekinetically, an ability she actually possessed beforehand but just never used because she didn't see much reason to, and her power to manipulate and redirect her own shots, have made the whole thing altogether even more ridiculously destructive.
And let it be said it was pretty out there beforehand already. Seriously, Kate is great at anything that involves blowing things up as hard as possible and her powers reflect that almost as much as her personality.
Nora, on the other hand, got the base upgrades of course, but also is finding her configurable weapon system to react even easier and smoother whenever she manipulates it, her combat style growing even smoother and more interconnected with this upgrade. Notably, however, the scissor blades she can unlatch to use as dual swords on occasion have become an even deadlier weapon in themselves; when used together, their cutting force becomes almost hydraulic and there's a subtle, but noticeable sheen on the blades themselves.
Where before she could easily cut through flesh and bone and even steel, she can now hack through massive boulders with ease. There's few nuts she won't be able to crack with this.
And, well, as for Taylor…
A massive wave of red energy washes over the landscape. It is a sustained beam, cooking the very atmosphere around itself with intense heat and washing over its target with its considerable, even radius of, what, one to two meters?
It is only after several seconds that it lets up, revealing the path of destruction torn by it. At its origin, Taylor stands, switching her personal laser rifle's safety on again.
It's a good thing you went way off towards the east to do these tests, you're pretty sure the glassy blast carved out a chunk of the ground all the way into the sea- you can see a small cloud of vapor where the water is slowly reversing the molecular disintegration it experienced, becoming H2O once again where it wasn't just propelled into the atmosphere as the heat flash-vaporized it.
"Good," Taylor nods. You are immediately getting a few Okita vibes over here.
Oh, and there's Last Embrace, of course. You didn't forget about your babies, not at all. Let's just say they've become just a little bit better and leave it at that, mhm?
It's the middle of the night. It also is fairly far from your actual territory, the very south-east of the Commonwealth, but that's because your target is right here; the last bastion of the band of mercenaries and raiders known as the Gunners, the city of Quincy taken through betrayal and butchery.
You stand next to Preston as the last preparations are made. Positions are taken, sniper nests sought out and secured, regular maintenance performed on weapons that need little to none.
Both of you are silent, at least outwardly. Inwardly, of course, you're coordinating with Taylor, who is providing overwatch for this little engagement, to ensure that none of your targets escape in the chaos.
The Minutemen are out in force. This is not a matter of throwing dangerous elements out of the areas you're planning to target; this is a matter of honor.
Quincy was where the last of the old Minutemen were defeated for the last time, going under entirely. Now it is up to the new ones to wash this indignity away.
There is no acceptable outcome to this other than complete and utter victory. Everyone present knows this, and there's a good few people present- around two hundred Minutemen, all told, opposed by no more than fifty Gunners as far as you can tell.
Prepared defenses or not, this will be a slaughter, you're pretty sure. Especially as you went ahead and attached twice your people's number in robots to them.
The Gunners are very, very outnumbered. And they haven't yet noticed the groups of silently creeping men and women encroaching onto their flanks from all sides.
The only thing that may be an issue of sorts is the collapsed highway leading past the ruins of Quincy itself, apparently used as a command post of sorts where high-ranking Gunners and their lieutenants are holding court. That and the network of criss-crossing walkways across the roofs would be a potent height advantage… If not for the copious amounts of absolutely overpowered weapons and destructive explosives you equipped your force.
You're still waiting, but it's for a formality than anything else. This fight's outcome is not in question.
"You know, I think I don't even hate them anymore." You radiate mild curiosity at Preston telepathically, so he elaborates. "I used to think I hated them, Clint and the Gunners and all of them. I'd see everyone that'd died, that they'd killed, every time I closed my eyes, and I'd blame myself for their deaths, but then I'd also blame them."
"But?" You ask to nudge him along.
"But I think by… by doing everything we did, rebuilding the Minutemen, rebuilding Concord, from the ground up, and everything I've learned along the way… It's not even a matter of hating them. There'll always be bad people, I think, even among the ones that do good. The issue is just that when the good guys aren't winning the day, those bad things can come out and do their thing."
He sighs, eyes wandering up unto the horizon.
"What I've learned is that it doesn't matter whether you're good or bad or anything else. What matters is what you do. Clint was a traitor. He betrayed us. But it's not even as much his fault as it was because of the circumstances that led to it all. And now?" Preston smiles thinly, without joy but instead a smidgen of satisfaction. "Now all we're doing is shooting up the bad guys. And I try to feel happy about it, but I don't. And I'm not sure I want to be. I just want to do good, and that means shooting everyone that stuck around Quincy after they killed everyone."
Man, some people have to make a giant thing about their emotions sometimes, don't they?
"You're just doing what you have to, in the end," you shrug. "Nothing more and nothing less."
"I guess so." Preston looks off into the distance wistfully for a few seconds longer before refocusing on the present. "I guess so. Thanks, Gabriel."
"Don't mention it." Also, what is that one chick off to the side doing? She looks like she's alternating between taking notes and having a stroke, but you can't see anything obviously wrong with her otherwise.
Weirdo, but hey, she seems like she's having fun. Let none say the Minutemen discriminate against the disabled.
The battle begins without much warning. One moment, the night is quiet, and Gunners' guards questionably alert and their majority asleep. The next, the sound of explosive weapon discharges washes over Quincy, the first offensive smashing against the lower fortifications with the force of an angry god's fist.
Turns out that numerical superiority crossed with the element of surprise and tightly packed firepower can pack quite a punch. Who knew?
The first push sees dozens of Gunners simply torn up, despite their admittedly swift reaction as a whole. They try to flank, cut off the Minutemen's advance, but while their tactics are adequate enough for the usual wasteland shenanigans they may need to deal with, they're caught decidedly off guard by the mass of robots and fighters that just doesn't stop, turning to face them instead as their comrades proceed onward.
That combined with the fact that any of their cover is simply blown apart by brightly glowing energy discharges means they're racking up casualties harder than a death metal concert.
As the lower city is turned into a victory march more than a battlefield, the people up top scramble to retaliate, including one asshole with a fat man and a couple rocket launchers in others' hands. At least one of the Minutemen will need medical attention, but while their armors aren't on the same level as their weapons, technologically speaking, it is pretty good at keeping them alive even when their limbs get all but torn off.
Naturally retribution trikes swiftly. By which you mean two dozen floating SP1D3Rs start to bombard the site of the attackers' last stand.
"I'm pretty sure Clint just got vaporized," is all Preston says as the Gunners' command centre is blown to literal bits, the highway shaken by the explosions and ramming maneuvers finally completely falling in on itself.
"Good riddance," you shrug. It's not like you ever knew him, but Preston did mention he was the one guy that went and did the whole betrayal thing in the first place, hence him mentioning the name earlier.
You continue watching as the massacre unfolds, not a single prisoner nor survivor staying around. By the end, all that's left of Quincy is an even more smoking ruin, the few mines and other traps placed by the Gunners being disabled and set to be recycled in short order.
There's no need to do any speeches or other propaganda. Everything that needed to happen happened, that's all there is to it.
And you do so love it when your minions just do as they're told.
The Gunners soundly defeated, if not necessarily eradicated in their entirety, you turn your attention towards other pursuits as the Minutemen conduct a few 'cleansing' operations to get rid of any remnants- as it turns out, they had a general propensity to set up defended camps and supply depots on some of the more accessible collapsed highways all over the Commonwealth, to the point a few pockets of them here and there remain regardless of their overall crushing defeat.
But hey, Preston's people have this well in hand. It's certainly something they can direct their energy towards. Like children, heavily armed men and women need constant activity and engagement to develop into healthy and productive individuals.
Anyway, you're back on the whole 'rebuilding civilization' thing for now. It's become somewhat of a minor little hobby of yours and you can't really think of much else to do, what with the Titan still under construction by your robots (progress is good, they'll just be finishing up for a few days now) and the others all busy doing their own things (Kate and Cait are touring Boston, Nora is doing some routine tests with Curie's help after she shooed you off and Taylor is playing with her mirelurks somewhere along the coast, while Cupcake is just being a brat and Isabel is trying to keep her in check).
Specifically, you're looking into rebuilding the railway network on at least a local level- the same thing you're doing on Earth Bet, really, just a little distance off.
Incidentally, you looked into it, but according to what few old map survived in the Boston Public Library, Brockton Bay didn't really exist on Earth Fallout. Kind of a bummer; it would've been hilarious to rebuild both and compare which was harder afterwards.
But yeah, the railroad. Not to be mistaken for the Railroad, which was stupid and mildly annoying.
Logistics are and remain an important part of any real economy, not to mention putting it back into business also means creating jobs- which, as you already went over, are in short supply these days anyway, so you may as well. Yes, sure, you could just teleport anything you need anywhere you need it, but your current goal is to make it so you don't need to, to keep teleportation restricted to actually important stuff- that is, things you personally want to do, not what any Jack and Jill may need.
It's actually kind of incredible technology and you don't want to let it be used against you, or at least not easily. Hence, restricting access and use of it to an extent, which in turn brings you towards having the rail lines checked over.
And well, what can you say… There's a lot of feral ghouls all over the ones you've looked at so far. Kind of a mild bother, that, but you can deal. And by 'you' you mean the robots you brought to murderize anything in your way.
Honestly, though, you're wondering whether it might not be easier to just give up on the rails as they are now and just completely remake them. They're rusted over (which isn't actually a big problem, trains grind rust off easily enough), rusted through (which is more of an issue), buried, warped, missing entirely…
You could fix them, but it'd be the same amount of effort as just figuring out how to make your robots lay them down themselves along new routes you plan out. And don't even get yourself started on the actual trains…
Screw it, you can do this better.
Trains are really just a set form of locomotion operating via a set path, using the rails to guide their course while their engines move them along them. You have seen how Columbia worked, in that bizarro parallel Earth (or you think it was anyway, could be people off the flying city were the normal ones), and how the parts of it followed regular schedules and traffic rules.
Designing a floating train is the work of ten seconds. Designing one that doesn't deviate from a set course, pre-programmed by yourself just to be sure, and can be operated despite the many obvious dangers of the wasteland, a tad bit longer, but not that much, truth be told.
Luckily, you do remember the Atlantic Express and how you basically reworked the thing several times over on your little journey through Rapture back then, before you took over the entire city. You already do know a thing or two about how trains work, though a lot of the experience isn't quite applicable to this one.
Still, there you go, the freighter-type train has been completed. It's really just like a normal train, truth be told, except it floats, can move faster and easier and trail both various wagons and shipping containers behind itself thanks to a little setup of pretty durable cables kept in the air through more Lutece Particles placed strategically and locked into a general few feet off the ground.
It's neither graceful nor as flexible as your usual vehicle solutions, but it doesn't need to be. What it does is transport a crapton of stuff from point A to point B with as little fuss in between as possible.
Basically a freighter, hence you declaring it to be a freighter-class. Time will tell whether it needs more than the pair of turrets at the front, but for now it'll do just fine.
And of course handling the cargo, while automated to some extent, will require a solid group of 'logisticians', as you have spontaneously decided to call the job.
In short, it will do just fine. Now for having a bunch of manufactories build a bunch of your first prototypes…
Next up on your list of re-civilization activities is… Well, a couple things, actually. Going through them in sequence…
Graygarden was originally an entirely self-sufficient hydroponic garden meant to function entirely without any human participation whatsoever- you think, anyway, you don't really care all much either way. It's run by a couple Mister Handys overseeing a couple other robots, just keeping it running for two centuries running.
You went ahead and met with them, offering them a steady and constant supply of fresh water (they'd been facing a few problems with that) and a few upgrades, along with your superior, gardening-specialized robots to use for their whole thing in exchange for their harvest and the expansion of their farming operation, possibly with the addition of human helpers.
They didn't want that last one, at first, as apparently part of their purpose is to keep the hydroponics productive without any human guidance in the equation, but you talked it out and as long as they remain in control and the humans are clearly working for them instead of the other way around, they don't seem to mind- much.
As for their crops, they'd just been letting them rot off to the side until now, so they really didn't mind letting them be used as food instead. Unfortunately, they did oppose adding a brahmin ranch to their property, as that would apparently 'damage the aesthetic', so there isn't any concerted cattle rearing for now.
You didn't want to push when you could always just use some other place for it.
Next up, there's another vault you are aware of, but while Nora left a great wealth of dead bodies in her wake back when she came through, the unfinished Vault 114 doesn't hold any phenomenal secrets despite your best efforts at poking it apart in search of them.
Annoying, but hey, they're only rotting a bit. In retrospect you should've sent some robots to pick them up at some point but really, who cares about another pile of bodies here on Earth Fallout of all places?
After that you were so saddened you decided to flee beyond the sea, to new lands and new possibilities. No, but seriously, there's an island off the coast you can see from the Castle when you squint your eyes, so you went to check it out.
Apparently, it used to be called Spectacle Island. Right now, it is mostly completely infested with mirelurks, so you call in your all-purpose solution for situations such as this; Taylor makes short work of all of them and you discover a fancy little loudspeaker program meant to specifically drive the things away from a given location.
You yoink that sonic deterrence for yourself just in case before joining Taylor in looking through the island. You'd think anyone with access to some way to drive mirelurks away wouldn't ever be driven off the island themselves, but as it turns out a couple raider corpses tell the story of how a bunch of moronic psychos went in balls first, fucked up any previous inhabitants and turned off the anti-lurker beacon, then got their genital regions thoroughly rearranged by way of giant crab pincers.
Well, the island's yours now, but the location does make it a tad awkward for casual use. Maybe you'll go ahead and build a little villa on it or something, some pre-war millionaire apparently had the same thought before being nuked out of existence.
Lastly, as evening fell over the Commonwealth, you went and took a tour of the Beantown Brewery. A bit unhygienic by anyone's standards, but that's about what you can expect of any place run by raiders; they did keep the brewery as such running, funnily enough, but for some reason decided to dunk a corpse inside of one of the big… brewing… things.
You ain't no brewer, okay?
Anyway, you go ahead and treat yourself to a little buffet in the form of a certain 'Tower Tom's' gang, including the guy himself. Turns out the girl inside the beer is actually the sister of some other, way more powerful raider boss, taken hostage and killed on accident all the while these guys were holding her ransom in exchange for regular food deliveries from the federal ration stockpile that way bigger gang is holed up in.
Raiders, man. They can't even keep hostages right. She literally died during a struggle when she tried to escape. Now, you don't really care personally, but perhaps if these guys were less drunk and instead more attentive, they could've tied her up properly and slash or kept a guard on her at the minimum.
You're doing the gene pool a favor by removing these guys from it, really.
New technology created:
Reality Fluctuation Dampener: While not powerful enough to impede any real concerted effort by anything mildly eldritch (or, say, your powers and magic), these protective helmets are capable of shielding mundanes from the side effects some eldritch presences have on them, such as slow-onset insanity, paranoia, schizophrenia, painful revelations about the truth of reality, etc. Not rated for Elder Thing, direct confrontations with things man is not meant to know or worse. Now with extra tinfoil.
You make sure Jack Cabot is wearing the helmet you designed, based off of his very own work on his father, before you allow him to proceed anywhere close to his assignment; it would be a massive waste of your time and effort to hire him on if he went and got himself driven insane before delivering any results, after all.
Not that he seems to mind. The idea of safety protocols seems to appeal to him on a fundamental level, perhaps because of how he had to be the only one doing science for centuries all the while pioneering a de facto new field, with no idea what he was doing or what to watch out for.
Edward Deegan, who insists on keeping an eye on his employer, is a bit more annoyed, but complies with your instructions despite his grumbling.
"Welcome to your first big assignment, from my end," you announce as you lead the two closer to the edge of the open-air quarry, not bothering with a helmet yourself as you're quite immune to what they protect against. "You will of course remember to never approach this place without the helmets and a robot escort at minimum and to meticulously log any time you spend anywhere near this sector at large."
"We will, though I do wish you would tell us what this is all about sometime soon," Jack notes sharply.
"Yeah, what's the hubbub all about?" The ghoul amongst you asks. "And how badly do we need that escort?"
"The escort's mostly there to kill you if the precautions aren't enough." That has both of them pay close attention. "This, gentlemen, is a quarry known as Dunwich Borers. Less well known is the fact that something is asleep deep below it, something the company that used to run it knew and was specifically seeking out and it isn't the only thing in there these days. Suffice to say there is a reason I had the entrance closed up by pouring several tons of molten steel into it and a constant perimeter with tremor sensors arranged. Just general vicinity to this place can drive people insane over time, something the helmets are meant to protect against. Any questions?"
"Why aren't you wearing one?" Edward asks first, as always immediately concerned with the most practical problems first and going from there. You do have a pretty good idea why his and Jack's dynamic works out like it does.
"I'm not going insane because I was from the start. Next!" You point at Jack.
"This is all very fascinating, but do we have any records of how the effect works or looks like? And what exactly are we meant to achieve here?"
"You'll have access to what I could piece together happened to the original workers and overseers from before the war as well as the raiders trying to scavenge here over long terms," you explain first. "Secondly, you are meant to find out what you can without endangering yourselves, with a focus on any useful or exploitable side effects of this whole thing. All the while under no circumstances allowing anyone to approach as before unless they're meant to be an ethically sourced test subject. All clear?"
"How do you ethically source a test subject for something like this?"
"There's always enough raiders, Jack," Edward reminds his companion. "And good riddance to any of them, too."
You wait a moment, but when nothing further is forthcoming, you nod. "Good. Also, please try not to accidentally end the world by waking up the things sealed beneath us, okay? That would be very nice."
No world ending while you have people you actually care about on said world.
All For One (Vampire TelepathyMind EaterSoul Palace): Using the telepathic connection shared between all vampires, it is possible to do more than share thoughts, instead drawing upon it to directly experience, learn and outright improve. Allows you to gain xp for powers and magic that your spawn has already learned every time you eat a Soul Palace fruit, taking the highest individual xp roll and applying it to a single training randomly rolled out from a power or spell of your choice.
Drowned Upgrades
Sonar: Why didn't you think of this in the first place? Oh, right, you didn't really mean for these to be moving away from Rapture for longer periods of time. Still, let's let these things navigate a little easier, shall we? (3 points)
Eldritch Core: Insert an Eldritch Core and watch as water resistance is almost nullified and these robots gain the ability to manipulate marine wildlife… somehow. (1 point)
Inbuilt Teleporter: Allows the DR-0WND to independently teleport both themselves and materials for construction around underwater (5 points)
Sonar Camouflage: Add a sonar scrambler to ensure that any systems meant to detect submarines or similar cannot differentiate a DR-0WND from a big fish (4 points)
Speed Enhancement: Use unlimited energy and enhanced engines to speed up the robots' underwater traveling speed to that of a slow fighter jet (3 points)
Passenger Capacity: Increase internal space without changing how big it is to allow a single passenger to ride inside a DR-0WND (2 points)
Remote Manipulation: Allow the tool arms to reach through areas of space not meant to allow them through and get to any places that need repairing (3 points)
Submarine Version: Scale the DR-0WND up into a full-scale submarine, with space for cargo and a small crew to ride the DR-0WNDED (5 points)
Shipping Container Mode: Allow DR-0WND to mechashift a little, turning into the form of into yellow shipping containers that may be shipped and/or transformed back at leisure (3 points)
There were many things in this world worth risking everything for. Worth dying for and worth killing for. Of course she may be the wrong person to say this, considering how many she'd killed.
Heh. Now she was back on this again. Taking a deep drink from the dark red fluid in her glass, she leaned back and-
"There you are, Addy. Come on, there's science to be done!"
She looked at the man that'd violated her. Dragged her to the depths of-
"Oh, are you doing one of those dramatic play-pretend book openings again?"
It wasn't, of course. Everything she was thinking was absolutely true and rooted in factual-
"You do know I can hear everything you're thinking?"
"You aren't supposed to read people's minds! Or at least not people in the network!" Addy complained, glaring up at the towering form of the actually pretty tall man her life pretty much revolved around these days.
"Not my fault you think so loud. Maybe you should work on your mental inside voice," he shrugged. Shrugged! "Also, is that Atlas Potion mixed with tato juice?"
"I tried using it to grow taller, but it won't even give me permanent abs." She couldn't help it. She pouted.
"Aww, don't worry, you don't need either of that to be our little Cupcake." She was yanked up by her shoulders, carried off like a… like a doll!
She truggled, but it was all in vain, the ill-mannered brute-
"Yes, you are our doll, too, aren't you?" He gave her a kiss on the head. "Now let's come on, Curie's waiting."
Addy crossed her arms. And let him carry her. Stupid sexy Gabriel and his stupid sexy abs.
Uyehara Yoshiaki was not a happy man. Being dead and enslaved to a soul-stealing, mass murdering, horrific, generally smarmy and badly abused as a child monster could do that to a man.
Now, though, now he was particularly unhappy. It could be said that his unhappiness was reaching new lows of negative happiness, in fact.
"How…" It wasn't easy to find the words. "How is this ever supposed to work? The process is delicate and needs extreme precision, we can't just 'throw this in there and make it work'!"
"Why not? It all comes down to the same process, we're just adding more tools to get it done with greater precision," the source of his frustration said with the unbearable casual smugness of someone that never had to actually think deeply about how to build a female robot better than the real thing-
A shudder overcame Uyehara. Was it Indigo? Had she found a way to-
"Besides we're going to be testing this on a couple hundred subjects we won't need to keep, anyway, so what's the matter?"
"May I remind Your Majesty Gabriel I. The One And Only that grown people don't qualify for- Wait, what?"
His Majesty Gabriel I. The One And Only shrugged. "I just decided to instate a law that says you have to call me that."
"… If it singles me out, it isn't a law!" He complained.
Rightfully so. This did not meet the definition of 'a law'. You couldn't just single out any single citizen in your legislature!
"It is if I say so. Remember the Palace isn't a democracy, mkay?"
"Urgh!" How… He couldn't work like this. And His Majesty Gabriel I. The One And Only really wasn't helping, either. "Can you please undo that before it drives me mad every time I think about you?"
"Oh, think about me often, do you?" Oh no. "Let's hope the missus doesn't get jealous of our close relationship."
"I hate you and I hate how you just did that specifically to annoy everyone involved in this whole situation and-"
"Come on, learn to take a joke already. Anyway, can we just take these things and shove them into the esperization process already? I have a schedule to keep to here."
The compulsion was indirect, suggested, but it was enough to press against his mind. "Fine. Fine! Just don't blame me when it turns out it won't work and your tests don't show how everyone's heads will explode because you're using grown adults instead of the teenagers traditionally experiencing the best chances for this."
"Don't worry, I'm sure we can find a way," His Majesty Gabriel I. The One And Only smirked.
"Argh, just, turn it off already! I can't concentrate like this!"
He did, but only after Uyehara begged him a few more times. Damn asshole.
The technical side of things is, as always, paramount in ensuring things work as intended. Can't shoot someone's face off if your gun is jammed, so to say.
That's why you're going out of your way to do this little upgrade to the technology allowing you to grant people esper powers. Specifically, you're integrating the VR pods capable of literally directly interfacing with a human brain- a feat so mind-boggingly complicated and delicate you sincerely doubt the locals actually came up with it on their own- and some of your own original technology into the whole mix.
Ideally, it should allow you to achieve more or less the same result, just with less fuss about it. As in, without the days of agonizingly annoying bullshit taking up your time and irritating you to no end.
Yes, sure, you won't use this stuff anymore in your unlife, barring very weird complications, but that's no excuse to leave it as it is, either. You still do plan to have others gain these additional phenomenal cosmic powers and if you can make it work with somewhat older subjects, that would be quite nice, far as you're concerned.
Though it does have to be said that you believe the age thing is less about actual age and more a mix between psychological factors and the biological makeup of the human brain differing between adults and children.
You aren't exactly a specialist, though you can't claim to be an amateur either, but if you had to hazard a guess it's something to do with neuro-plasticity and, simply put, attitude. A grown person or even a teenager has a different way of viewing or considering the world around them, more experiences confirming the laws of physics to be what they are, than a child possessing a generally much more whimsical, fantastical perspective on everything.
Just look at yourself. You do suspect your ability to get a power had less to do with turning into a child physically and more with the knowledge that physics are very much not set in stone as far as you're concerned and slash or that the world revolves around you rather than the other way around.
Perhaps a cast-iron sense of arrogance and egocentrism is also helpful in this. Wouldn't contradict the rest of your theories as to the exact details of the discriminatory superpower granting process.
In other news, you also went ahead and integrated the drug damage removal stuff you got from the druggie vault; it's a bit specialized and all, but cheating with reality gets you around the practical issues that would otherwise get in the way for something like this.
All in a couple days' work. Now if only you had a way to test all of this stuff on Yoshi just out of petty principle…
On the one hand, playing God was a surprising lot of fun, once you figured out how to properly 'program' FEV in the context of a creature like a deathclaw, but on the other hand, you may or may not have overdone it.
You know, in a general sense. Then again, nobody can tell you what to do to begin with, so so what if you took a giant, kind of humanoid lizard that is best described as several tons of murder machine, hatred and hunger and turned it into a damn insect tank the size of a super-gorilla with acid spit on top?
The test subject stills where it was trying to break out of your lab, having been hatched and flash-grown due to the characteristic effects of FEV. Just in time, too; any longer and it would've seriously damaged the infrastructure by actually getting out of containment and triggering your security measures.
Then again, this is arguably what they're for. You made them with your dislike of having your specimens ruining everything in sight in mind and a giant, armored, insectile super-murdermachine counts, especially with how it managed to bust open the walls of its chamber.
Totally worth using that deathclaw egg for.
"Is that… For me?" Taylor asks, coalescing behind you out of thousands of individual bugs streaming in from all corners of your lab. Why she doesn't just use the teleporters like any reasonable person is beyond you, but hey, more power to her.
"Surprise? I wanted to do something nice for you, so me and Curie tried combining deathclaws with insect DNA to make a giant bug version of them," you explain. "How is it? Anything we should change up while it's still there or-"
Taylor hugs you, arms wrapped around your chest from behind and her forehead pressing against your back. "It's perfect," she murmurs.
You let her stay like that for a few moments, watching as the colossal creature you created (it's about thrice your height, outclassing the original deathclaw size in all dimensions by a good chunk) slowly begins to dissolve into a stream of much, much smaller bugs.
She's taking her time for this, almost as if she's afraid she's only allowed to hug you until it's done. You ponder whether to grow a paw to pat her head with despite the angle when Curie, having been in the room all along, claps happily.
"Oui, oui, now is when you 'ave intercourse, n'est-ce pas? I cannot wait to observe."
Never change, Curie.
It is, you consider, an oddly quiet and seemingly inconsequential motion with which the Titan begins moving. There is no shaking ground, no massive wave of noise and heat as any engines ignite, not even a little mini-earthquake due to the mass being lifted up from where it's resting against the earth.
One moment, it is there, a gigantic complex structure the size of a whole city crammed into a single building (because it is), the next it simply lifts off, displacing a truly massive volume of air in its ascent towards the sky.
The whole thing is so big you can't actually see it in its entirety, covering the horizon and casting an enormous shadow onto the ground.
… You'd bet this thing could spawn an entire unique ecosystem just by staying parked over a particular stretch of land for a long enough time, what with the changed sunlight conditions it would cause simply by being there.
Of course, you don't just stay there looking at it from the outside forever, you quickly have yourself teleported inside somewhere around the center, where you have erected a control bridge in the space once occupied by the Prydwen before you basically used it as a convenient chunk of support beam.
Systems are all green, nothing your sensors can tell is out of order and the cameras and control stations are functioning without any issues to speak of. With that cleared up, you nod to yourself, going over your immediate itinerary now that this step is complete.
… You probably shouldn't test the weapons in the vicinity of Concord, actually. However, nothing stops you from doing the same for the engines, so you go ahead and input a course to take Titan around the smaller, ground-bound city in a curved path meant to keep it from blotting out the sun for anyone inside.
It's to be expected, but still, it is immensely freeing to see your project function exactly as intended. Next up, languidly surfing along the sky while you deal with the consequences of firing your baby up.
Fun fact, you had been going out of your way to keep the exact specifications of your 'big little project' a secret from the others, mostly for one particular purpose; seeing the looks on their faces once you finally revealed what exactly it is.
Isabel was the only one with a chance at really envisioning the sheer scope of what you've been doing, as she's the only one with a good idea where and how you may be using your resources, robotic and otherwise, at any one time, but her eyes are still the size of saucer plates as you explain the Titan's size and functions.
"… so as you can see, it is completely self-sufficient, given a large enough population, and completely sea- and spaceworthy; save planetary crust, there is just about no environment it can't move through," you finish, having gone over the extensive, wonderful and extensively wonderful uses of a giant spaceship slash flying city slash flying fortress.
Including a tour, of course, from Sarah Plaza to the Taylor Apartments. The latters' namesake was really embarrassed, but you're keeping the names, at least provisionally.
Preston in particular seems almost like he's given up on reality, blankly staring at his surroundings within one of the many empty halls ready to be given purpose through the Titan, or Titan City or whatever.
This isn't going to be sufficient, of course. "Hey, Preston, I hope you took notes, because I've arranged a meeting with a reporter from Diamond City, chick named Piper Wright. You good for that?"
"I- Gabriel, I am still getting over the flying city you built for fun. Sorry, but… I think I might need a moment for that, okay? And maybe a stiff drink or two."
"Don't worry, you'll manage," you nudge his shoulder as you pull him along with yourself. "In fact, how about I give you a bit of last-minute coaching for this? Talking to reporters is actually pretty straightforward when you get down to it…"
The Titan: Massive flying city and fortification, built to house the population of a small nation in one place. Surprisingly mobile for its size, that of a nation's capital stacked onto itself several times.
Lutece Devices: Distributed throughout the structure, providing lift by pushing up against stable support beams keeping the Titan in the air
Engines: Large-scale engines driven by inexhaustible Eldritch Cores to provide maneuverability
Atmosphere Containment: A design stolen from Columbia, keeping a breathable atmosphere regardless of how high or low the Titan flies (in combination with a few air scrubbers)
Expansive living space distributed throughout the city, apartment-style in large 'building' blocks that can be moved around and house large amounts of people comfortably
Public spaces to complement more private living ones. Markets, indoor parks, sports fields, arenas, whatever people can think of putting into them ultimately
Sunlight Domes: Large domes of armored glass let in sunlight across designated areas, shining along cleverly arranged parks and similar open areas (as well as spiral staircases with open platforms for any that wish to do spend more time in it)
Water Catchers: Atmospheric water catchers to swoop up and filter atmospheric water in flight, keeping Titan's water tanks filled up at all times
Hydroponics: Large-scale hydroponics run largely by robots with only minimal supervision required, meant to feed millions of people at a minimum
Pod Network: Public transport in the form of a network of electromagnetically moved pods in various sizes and with stations all over Titan
Shifting Habitats: Titan's 'city blocks' may be moved around, rearranging its internal structure as required with trivial ease, to the point of making it a daily feature to reduce traffic requirements
Hologram Network: Holograms may be used commercially and publically for announcements or entertainment in public spaces and even privately inside homes
Satellite Platforms: The Titan can separate parts off of itself, temporarily splitting its pieces in order to accomplish separate objectives or quarantine parts of itself
Big Teleport: The Titan may teleport itself and all aboard it by linking into the rest of the teleportation network or relying on the signal it puts out itself
Armoring: Well-distributed weight means a lot of capacity for armoring, so lots of armor was implemented
Weaponry: Enormous rail guns meant to propel large chunks of metal at a target at speed make up the main weaponry, but sustained laser cannons for long-lasting beams complement them
Superweapon: A gigantic weapon taking up an entire habitat block can be moved around like the rest to allow flexible firing on any desired targets. Causes wide-area devastation and may be fired up to thrice in quick succession before it begins to break reality so bad it cannot be used anymore. May randomly scramble the laws of physics in small ways temporarily in and around the impact zone.
Launching Pads: Hidden pads along the outside can be used to launch drone or jets, with complementary hangars, maintenance bays, repair bays, etc.
Forcefield: Forcefield generators generate a transparent field around the Titan, blocking off most projectiles and similar, though it can be overloaded through sustained fire. Good for ramming through mountains, however.
Assimilation Drive: The Titan may scoop entire areas of the ground up using gravity manipulation and mechahift technology, drawing them into itself and taking them apart or assimilating them as they are; may be used to harvest resources on large scales
Labyrinth Pathways: Parts of the Titan's structure have been made to overlap in reality, allowing anyone that enters specific tunnels or doors exit other tunnels or doors elsewhere around the city; the transition is subtle enough to be unnoticeable in the moment
Eldritch Energies: Eldritch Cores, Eldritch Manufactories and more have been implemented
Reserved Space: A significant amount of space has been reserved for personal projects, such as building resorts
Self-Duplication: The Titan is capable of duplicating any facilities or habitats within it by consuming the appropriate resources
Spaceworthy: Can be flown into space, generating its own gravity and 'refocusing' Lutece Particles in order to orient itself; also comes with its own atmosphere and everything required to be a space station
"I'm really sorry about this, but she insisted she had to come along," Piper apologizes again, her sister following behind her. "You know how kids can get."
"No need to worry, I'll take care of her until you're done. Shouldn't be all that long anyway," you wave her off. And when you say that, you mean that you've instructed Preston to waste some time and get the story you want known across, then make sure Piper is shown around a few places to ensure you have enough time for what you're planning.
Just not all day. Not that long, as you said.
Nat, for her part, is pretty quiet, just looking up at you. Her sister just nods, already having expected what you told her. "Alright, you be good and listen to Gabriel here okay? You still got the caps for lunch and-"
"I'll be fine, sis, just go already," she says in that wonderful tone of a child that's heard what it's being told way too often already and stopped caring. "I'll just follow this man and do whatever he says."
You have to repress the snort. Oh, she knows exactly what kinds of things you'll be telling her to do.
"That's what I was afraid of, but you just try not to let her get into any trouble, okay?"
"Don't worry, don't worry, I wouldn't have volunteered if I couldn't deal with kids. Now go on, wouldn't want to be late," you say, watching on as Nat pushes Piper along to make her go already.
Both of you watch on as she disappears into the Minutemen HQ, the former Museum of Independence. "She's just worried because this isn't Diamond City," she murmurs finally. "Back home she never minds just letting me run around on my own, but…"
"I get it, this is a strange new place. Bet you had to fight to get her to take you along at all," you say. "So, to get on the same page, I'm Gabriel. Welcome to Concord, I guess."
"I'm Nat." She reaches out a hand, letting you shake it. The girl is still wearing that combination of pant under a skirt, plus a sweater and stuff, but you're very much planning to change that. "Nice to meet you."
You return the nod she gives you. "Say, did you let your hair grow out? Or just forget to cut it?"
"You noticed," she blinks, surprised. Then she straightens up. "Of course I did it on purpose. So are we going to stand around here all day or get a move on already?"
She stretches her hand out to you again, this time with a different meaning. Taking it into your own with a chuckle, you begin walking with Nat in tow. "There's a lot of places I could show you, but I doubt you'd be interested in most of them," you smile.
Such as any that don't involve her being screwed silly. Now, what to suggest first…
This was so exciting! Nat had to pull her belly in because of how her tummy was threatening to boil over with something she didn't want to let out yet, her hand feeling wet against the big, warm one of Gabriel, as she now knew.
"So where are we going then?" She asked, curious. They were definitely going to do naughty stuff, right?
"You'll see," the man smiled, the same smile he made when he came to visit Piper (and Nat, kind of). Good.
She'd been worried he wouldn't want to do anything without her sister there, but thankfully that wasn't the case. So instead she could…
They walked into an alley, making her already think about all the things they could do right there out in the open, but then Gabriel took something out, his thumb tapping against it as he smiled at her. In a flash, everything around them changed ad all of a sudden, they were inside a room.
It was a very strange room. The walls were a warm white, there was nothing on the ground except furniture and the biggest piece of that was a giant bed with more white sheets and big, red pillows in the shape of hearts.
They looked really fluffy.
"You like it?" Gabriel asked, one hand on her shoulder now. "We're in Sanctuary, my secret base. No word to Piper, though, okay? She has to find out on her own."
Nat giggled at the finger held before his mouth. He was right, if her sister wanted to find out anything, she had to investigate herself, didn't she?
She nodded.
"Good. Also, could you raise your hands a bit? Just like that, thank you." All of a sudden, Nat was getting a little breezy, looking down to see that her clothes had disappeared!
They hit the ground next to her, goosebumps on her skin nothing to do with any cold, it was actually nice and warm inside where they were. Unsure what to do, she looked up at Gabriel.
He still smiled, hands darting down across her skin. "Isn't that much better? Wearing clothes all day gets really stuffy, I think."
"Then why're you still-" Swoosh, swoosh and he was completely, "-naked?"
Now that he was in the same room as her, it was a lot more intimidating to be so close to those chiseled muscles and tanned skin, moving hypnotically every time Gabriel did. She put her hands over her eyes, but when she felt him come even closer, she peeked between her fingers anyway.
"How about we go ahead and skip the usual games to play something else, hm?" He asked, close enough he had to be able to hear Nat's heart beat. "Unless you don't want to, yet. That's fine, too."
She peeked downwards. His penis was there, half-hard and it felt like it might be the size of her arm. Again.
But then she looked back up at his face, and nodded. The bubbly warm tingles in her belly wouldn't let her do anything else. "O-okay. Let's do it."
"That's my Nat," he smiled, sitting down on the bed to be at her height. "Doing everything I say just like you told Piper you would. Don't worry, though, we can take it slow, okay?"
She squeaked as he dragged her into his lap, freezing when she felt his thing on her butt. Nat was still wearing her skirt and pants, but through them the heat and hardness were pressing up against her.
Gabriel's hands stroked her skin, now, coming to rub her breasts. She didn't have much, but she was a growing girl, so it was okay, right? Piper had a good enough pair so she would, too, in a few years, so she wouldn't be ignored in favor of her sister, right?
… She couldn't help herself. "They aren't too small, right?"
"Not at all," the man that'd seduced her sister and stuck his penis in Nat's mouth answered soothingly. "They're cute. They can just grow naturally, but they won't stop looking good, they're on you after all."
This was very dangerous. Nat knew exactly why Piper had hooked up with Gabriel now. She thought, anyway.
His fingers felt really good on her skin. Now they were going down and she knew what was going to happen, so Nat tensed up, but he just rubbed a few circles along her sides until she stopped and only then pushed her skirt down to unbutton her pants.
"There we go," he cooed, pushing the rest of her clothes down, except her skirt that caught on one of her legs and was ignored. With really dexterous hands, he even took off her shoes when she raised her legs for him, breathless at the feeling of naked skin on naked skin.
She'd touched his thing before. Had even taken it into her mouth. But somehow, having it rub against her butt like this, slowly getting harder, was…
It was.
Then she was whirled around, put on the bed by really gentle hands. It was soft and comfortable, if her heart wasn't fluttering in her throat Nat would've been tempted to go to sleep on it right then and there.
On all fours now, she looked backwards, but Gabriel was there, prowling closer like an animal. She clenched her hands, thinking he was going to mount her, but then he came nearer with his upper body-
Licked her? "Hwah," Nat made, surprised, but he didn't stop, hands massaging her butt now while his tongue worked her private place over.
It was even going inside. She had to be so wet down there and he had to be tasting it, it was so embarrassing she could die! But it also felt good, especially when he started licking her inside, so she just wiggled and moaned in place.
Then she did the thing again. She felt it coming on, building up inside her head and under her stomach until it exploded, making her make weird sounds and shake a bunch.
Slurping a little behind her, Gabriel gave her butt a soft swat. "There we go, now you should be ready."
"Ready for what?" She asked.
"Ready for the real fun, Nat," he said, now upright on his knees. She could see his penis, standing up all the way like a hard rod, knowing from experience how it would feel to hold it.
Her thighs were a mess. And the sheets under them. And-
She twitched violently. There it was, the big head of the rod she'd sucked on before rubbing against her private place. It felt like a succession of laser pistol shots, hot and piercing, and he wasn't even in yet!
A hand stroked along her spine. "There, there," Gabriel said. It helped, a little.
Then he pushed, and Nat instantly went weird. Her head flew far away and she made a lot of weird sounds, feeling it go inside of her. "Awawaw."
"That good, hm?"
"Mg, gah!" It was inside of her. So deep inside. And he wasn't stopping, either.
Gabriel was thrusting and plundering her treasure and she didn't even hurt. Nat had heard it was supposed to hurt so she'd been preparing herself, but all she felt was gooood.
He was stretching her open with his penis and the only thing she could think about was the possibility of staying attached to it forever, sorry to Piper but Nat lived on it now so she wouldn't share.
She gurgled out a laugh at the absurd thought that was quickly washed away by the controlled pistoning making her mouth open and her eyes clinch shut.
Almost. Nat was too embarrassed to have them open. It made sense in her mind.
Finally, penetrating her deeper and deeper deliciously slowly, Gabriel addressed her again. "Like it?" He asked, touching a place inside of Nat that felt different and made her throb.
"W-waaah," she answered.
"Good to hear," he grinned, she could hear it in his voice, and gave the back of her head a kiss.
Nat was feeling great. Greater than great. Also, Piper was a bad bad because she'd had this all along and never shared.
She eagerly received her pounding, panting and moaning, doing the thing again and again like her life depended on it. Her skin was on fire where Gabriel touched it, feelings firing off every time he moved, her insides throbbing every time now.
Then he started pounding her really fast and she took a moment to recall what'd happened with Piper and how he'd also done the same before spurting the white stuff.
But this time, he didn't pull out, continuing on inside of her. Nat's arm failed her when she felt it, something burning hot and heavy coming out inside of her, painting her insides white.
Her eyes also went white, literally. Just barely conscious, both her and him just stayed like that while he discharged his load, every twitch and every spurt like a hot iron of pleasure.
Then he stopped, caressing her shoulders and back as he slowly drew back out. "How do you feel, Nat?"
Still feeling a blooming heat on her face, she moaned when she felt him leave her, pushing up with her wobbly arms.
Sitting up, she looked and saw the white stuff leaking from herself, red and wollen down there. Touching it, she gave it a taste, realizing it somehow tasted even naughtier like this.
She looked back, grinning at Gabriel lewdly. "Like I want to go more."
He wiped wet, sweaty hair from the corner of her face. "Glad to be of service," he murmured, turning her around and pinning her down on the softest bed ever.
If this was a dream, Nat wasn't waking up.
If anything, she went to sleep a while later, blacking out with a chain of explosions that shook her to the core.
Piper Wright had been a reporter, or 'reporter', for many years now, always looking to uncover the truth wherever it was hidden and fighting against adversity all the way.
It was a little weird, then, just how easily she got at it in Concord. It made her suspicious, no matter how much her brain might claim that it really didn't seem like the Minutemen Reborn had anything to hide.
… Mhm, she may need to think on the title of her article a little more. It worked for the moment, though.
Concord was pretty neat, she had to admit. The Minutemen had, according to the stories, built a giant wall straight through the ruins one day using their vaunted workforce of robots, allowing people to settle in the city much like Diamond City's wall was what had allowed it to flourish. Not stopping there, they'd somehow gotten their hands on ways to build more and more robots, most likely by taking over for whoever the 'Mechanist' had been, another figure with lots of robots she'd investigated that just so happened to have disappeared shortly beforehand.
Well, it was probably a good thing. Sending robot to randomly kill people certainly deserved a visit by the vigilantes-turned-army, if anything.
It didn't stop there, though. Somehow, the Minutemen kept on getting their hands on new technology- and not just old stuff they'd restored, Piper could've bought that, but the thing she was seeing? Nothing like them existed before the war, or at least not openly, she'd have seen some signs before if they had.
And then a giant thing started flying, blotting out the sky and just hanging up there? Yeah, no, something was up.
Sadly, for all that General Preston Garvey was direct and open with her about everything that was going on inside of Concord, including many of the technologies being spread around for a price, the man was clamming up on where they actually came from.
Which she could understand, from a certain point of view. If they had some miracle machine hidden away somewhere, they wouldn't want the news spread.
That didn't stop Piper from trying to find out more. She knew now that Sanctuary was indeed the source and that captured raiders were sometimes brought in that direction, so if it was some apocalypse waiting to happen people would still need to know.
"So you're planning to spread these local products to Diamond City too, then?" She asked, finding back to the tail end of the interview she'd gotten despite all of this. It wasn't often that powerful people just… Answered questions like this, but it was probably a good sign.
"You'll need to ask the city's mayor about more details, as we're in the middle of planning the logistics, but yes, if it goes according to plan, the people of Diamond City will have the same opportunities as the ones here in Concord," the man still wearing his cowboy hat even inside his office said. He'd been dropping these perfect quotes all interview and Piper wondered if he'd come up with them on his own or someone had written them for him.
"I'm sure people will be glad to hear that," Piper said. And, truth be told, many would. There always would be those assholes and naysayers that would complain because they'd feel entitled to being better than everyone else for being born in Diamond City, but those people weren't the majority, no matter how it seemed sometimes.
… She wondered how Nat was doing. The little brat'd insisted she come along, so she may as well take her around Concord once she was done here. Gabriel better had be taking good care of her, she expected some standards from any men she actually kept sleeping with.
You'll need to ask the city's mayor about more details, as we're in the middle of planning the logistics, but yes, if it goes according to plan, the people of Diamond City will have the same opportunities as the ones here in Concord, you send, making sure you're keeping on track with everything you've got going on.
The interview has been going well so far, with a good couple PR-friendly lines dropped and the Minutemen coming away looking squeaky clean, at least on this account. You're sure Piper can dig up something on you if she tries hard enough, not like you really tried to keep everything you did so far hidden, but it'll take her a while, at least.
That said, while you're using Preston as a glorified sockpuppet for this, not that he minds, he's actually kind of lost and nervous about this whole thing, you yourself are busy making sure Piper's sister is doing alright and won't give the game away.
Specifically by brushing her hair and making sure her new clothes do fit her. "Anything too tight or too wide? I can adjust this stuff if you want."
"This is good," she begins shaking her head, remembering you're working her hair at the last moment. "Do you really have to do that?"
"I do," you confirm without a second thought. "You have really pretty hair, it'd be a shame to let it get tangled into knots. That aside, are you still sore anywhere?"
"A little, but it's alright," she says, legs kicking into the air where she sits. "I like it. Can you tell me when you're done?"
"Just a moment, here we go," you note distractedly. It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Wright. If you have any more questions, please feel free to ask around, I'm sure someone will be happy to give you all the answers you may need. "Your sister should be done soon, too, so we'd better get back in a bit."
"Have to do something beforehand, though," Nat tells you, making you quirk a smile.
"Oh?"
"Mhm." She turns around, getting up on the chair you had her on to wrap her arms around your neck and giving you a kiss. "My first one," she shyly lets you know. "Had to be sure you got it."
"And I'm happy for it, too." You give her a return kiss and, if it were not for your time limit, making out like this would almost certainly lead to another couple rounds of fun.
Too bad, but what needs, must and all that.
Sadly, you can't just disappear the Wright sisters for a couple of days of intense and thorough fun for the whole family, much as you'd love to- you'd be giving away the whole game after you just got Nat to promise she'll keep the secret and that absolutely wouldn't do.
Watching Piper run around trying to gather clues and investigate is surprisingly funny, too, just as a side thing.
But regardless, with the younger sister reunited with the older one (and secretly being smug at her over getting laid, which is just hilarious to watch), work once again calls upon you, that is, Preston has let you know there's a radio signal coming from the west requesting urgent aid that was already looked into.
Normally you would just ignore something like that, let the Minutemen overseeing a subset of your robot forces deal with it, but apparently, there's not actually supposed to be anything out in that direction, or at least no civilians; a few scouts went around a good long while ago already and found no permanent settlements nor even any roads that seem like they might've seen even semi-frequent use.
Hence the Minutemen's General had a hundred robots and a handful of his people go there and thoroughly pacify everything in sight while they investigated. Aside from a small battalion of Gunners that managed to evade the slaughters down south, however, they also found a guy pretending to be wounded inside the Nuka-World Transit Center (from where the call for aid was coming).
A quick and thorough interrogation later and it turned out that the pre-war amusement park was actually taken over by raiders that also enslaved the small enclave of traders and travelers that used the place as their home base, including the guy's family. Hence they forced him to go and try to attract victims for some death trap they had set up to lure unwary victims into for their amusement, because that's just what raiders do, you suppose.
Naturally, this is something for you to look deeper into, if only because you're always looking for blood and souls to take, but hey, maybe the rides are still in working order, too…
The monorail, in a small miracle of actually well-built tech, still actually works, not a single part of the rail twisting through the air for honestly longer than you would've thought necessary too warped or missing for it to run more or less smoothly.
Naturally you ignore both the recorded announcer's voice introducing Nuka-World to any would-be visitors and the raider that links into the speakers to blabber at you as you go. Neither are of any particular interest to you, that's all.
Is it a tad bit presumptuous and slash or arrogant of you to do this, just bust into the raiders' traps by your lonesome and bitchslap everything they meant to put into your way just because you can? Maybe.
Are you still doing it for the sheer hell of it? Definitely. When in doubt, you can always just teleport in some reinforcements, too, as you're still carrying your usual tracker with you and this area is well within your range thanks to the transmitters you incorporated that one time.
Stepping out once you're inside the station on the other side of your ride, you continue to ignore the announcer (a different raider, this time, but at least a living person still) calling you 'fresh meat' while you move on in.
As it turns out, all it took to find some proper signposts in this post-apocalyptic hellhole was to come here to these psychopathic assholes making a fun game out of a deathtrap gauntlet they painstakingly set up.
It won't save them, but you do appreciate it.
Walking on it, you make a point of being completely unharmed by several turrets set up around the first room, standing in the middle of it and letting both bullets and lasers rain against your impenetrable self.
Only after about half a minute of this do you move on, trampling through traps and their triggers equally, using a combination of your powers (adhesion to surfaces, increasing your weight, redirecting momentum of things around you) to walk straight through explosions meant to tear unwary 'contestants' apart.
The people running this thing have to have some way to watch, else the announcer wouldn't actually know how you're doing, but he's actually starting to sound worried now. Good on him, but again, it won't save anyone from what's to come.
Next off comes a set of three doors, two of which are trapped and only one of which leads onward (you used your gravity power in conjunction with fire from Last Embrace to tear the whole arrangement out of your way without so much as breaking stride) after which you go on underground into some kind of tunnel network the raiders used for the next couple stages.
The challenges within include a room full of more turrets, activated by a motion-activated clapping monkey toy (you decided to pose dramatically for effect as the bullets bounced off again), a couple of irradiated rats (that got summarily turned into paste), a tunnel full of old vehicles and landmines (fun fact, you can actually make a pretty good impression of moonwalking through the air when you try), a couple locked doors and more explosives (you're making an art out of walking through explosions at this point, your aura helps cover up for a magnitude of sins) and some kind of poison gas flooding a self-locking old maintenance room (you proceed to take out the door along with the wall around it, again).
Emerging back above the ground, you're greeted by mildly giant ants (note to self, bring Taylor here, the local fauna is obviously of some interest) and then the 'audience' moving up above you on the other side of some grates.
Apparently, the raiders watching along are traditionally supposed to shoot at you as you go. You proceed to dare them to try and completely erase the first one to take you at your word from existence with a blast of heat strong enough to carbonize him that also completely disintegrates matter into its atomic components.
You love the upgrades to Last Embrace.
Finally you bust straight through into the 'cola-cars arena', which you suppose used to be a bumper car ride for the amusement park, but now instead there's a guy in power armor hooked up to the electricity lines up above.
Another raider is behind him, too, fiddling with the electronics and making a shield of lightning, of sorts, come to life on the surface of the armor.
"There's the cunt that blew up the Gauntlet, eh?" The armored raiders asks as he spies you through a pane of glass, still a floor above the arena floor. "You may have fucked up the fun part, but nobody gets through my-"
"Got it, I'll take it apart after I'm done peeling you out of it like canned meat," you say coolly, your voice penetrating walls and windows equally easily.
Then you cool-aid man straight into the arena, landing in front of the guy. Good old flash step, it never lets you down.
Without missing a beat you engage your good ol' shapeshifting powers, growing larger and furrier, growing yourself a snout and sharp claws as your body bulges out to accommodate your new size.
Barely still fitting within the confines of the building you're in, you growl, a deep, guttural sound, now an enormous cross between a man and wolf rippling with muscle and thick fur. A swipe of your large, clawed hand wipes away the cables hanging in front of you, the electricity barely even tingling as you siphon it away with your lightning hands.
Now several times the size of the power armor your 'opponent' is wearing, you loom over him, shuffling on your knees and hands due to space constraints. "What the fucking fuck is this shit?!" He screams, sounding notably hysterical.
You pick him up in one hand, ignoring his panicked flailing and desperate attempt at emptying his shotgun at your fingers. Giving him a good squeeze, you crush something important, you're pretty sure, as the scent of blood emanating from him grows much stronger.
Then you pop a finger through his helmet and down his head and body, quite thoroughly impaling him. A new definition of finger food, you suppose with a wolfish grin to yourself, shaking the limp corpse off your claw so it slams onto the ground, blood pushing out of the twisted wreck of a body to flow up through the air and into your muzzle.
You look at the exit of the arena, where a bunch of raiders are standing and gaping open-mouthed.
Good thing your teeth and stomach can deal with metal and glass just as easily as flesh and bone, because the next thing you do is ram your head through and devour everyone that doesn't run fast enough alive, snapping jaws large enough to bite a man in half easily if you can't fit them down your maw.
You burst out onto the scene once you've eaten your fill inside, a snarling, building-sized creature breaking through concrete like it was butter. With a thought, the reinforcements you had on standby are teleported all around your current position, courtesy of Isabel helping you out, right into the middle of a screaming mass of raiders and, judging by the collars, some kind of slaves of theirs.
You do not let that distinction bother you. Thanking the roboticist (because what else is Isabel, really) in the privacy of your mind, you proceed to champ down on the victims arrayed before you, an actually sizeable number of them present for consumption.
As that happens, the robots, mainly a mix between Hammers and SP1-D3Rs, spread out, seeking to gain control of the situation and firing on anyone running away- which, to the credit of the raiders' mental faculties compared to their normal ilk, is pretty much everyone- in order to contain the mass of humans you are about to thoroughly remove from this place in a violent fashion.
The slaves are of no use to you; most are, statistically, going to be uninteresting in terms of souls and, consequently, flavor, but they can be repurposed into producing more blood easily enough- when not eaten in full, the flavor of their morality doesn't matter, only their health, which is guaranteed through the automated systems you've set up.
You chase after the raiders, dressed in three broad styles, many of which are trying to organize as correspondingly attired forces come from three directions; some wear what amounts to stereotypical mafioso clothing, some bear some kind of colorful tribal armor and clothing, particularly preferring tooth necklaces and the like, while the third group is veiled in black hoods and masks.
Fittingly, the first group uses a bunch of guns with silencers screwed on, the second throws itself at you with heavy machine guns or their bare fists (you take everything about their intelligence you mentioned back, by the way) and the third, you suppose gang, predominantly uses knives and other bladed weapons, though they aren't exactly free of additional firepower in the form of a few pistols and the like.
Needless to say, you absolutely wreck everyone's shit. It is no exaggeration to say you are fucking them out of existence. Your speed and strength, not to mention reach and extreme durability, enable you to eat entire groups at once, snapping them up directly with your elongated maw or snatching them off the ground to be thrown up and caught in your teeth.
There is nothing they can do to stop you.
There is nothing they can do to run.
And, finally, as you choke the life out of the last screaming savage, there is no way they can persist.
Nuka-Cola World is a lot larger than this initial area around the transit centers you have cleansed of raider presence, leaving only the few you do not even deign to devour unconscious under the care of your robot forces after they thoroughly disabled their ability to do anything meaningful, but as you take a moment to look around, coincidentally trampling over the themed areas these raiders claimed for their respective factions, you find that these seem to have been the only living humans closeby according to the memories flooding into your mind.
Good enough.
With the, as you could argue, core of Nuka-World, the only real connection to any place other than miles and miles of empty wasteland in all directions, under your control in the form of the transit center near Fizztop Mountain, the former home of the 'boss' of this heap of unruly assholes, all that remains now is to clean up the rest of the amusement park and see if you can't find anything useful.
And do so you shall, just not in person. The scale of this place is, uh, pretty expansive, turns out they put enough buildings to ape at being a small town within the walls of Nuka-World, hence you shall very much require reinforcements for this part given the memories of eaten raiders tell you of the various dangers lurking within the larger attractions.
Because of course the attraction around the park have been taken over by some dangerous things intent on mauling anything coming near. Earth Fallout, man. This is just so this whole place.
In order, the World of Refreshment was taken over by Taylor pretty quickly- it's not like the mutated mirelurks subjected to extreme quantities of Nuka Cola Quantum (nicknamed nukalurks) are any more resistant to her powers than any other creature with a biological exoskeleton you've encountered so far, spoopy blue glow or no.
And they do have some serious blue glowing going on. What did they put into the 'quantum' stuff again?
Well, that aside, Dry Rock Gulch had a pretty bad bloodworm infestation- human adult-sized, spiky, hyper-aggressive worms with four-pronged maws and a preference for laying their larvae inside of warm-blooded creatures they killed.
Had, because you have a solution to any insect-based troubles on hand.
Basically, just another one for the pile of horrible crimes against sanity and nature Taylor got on this trip, once she was done with the nukalurks.
Fun fact, these things can swallow a man's upper body whole when they really try. You know this because you tried it out for the sake of curiosity.
As in, on someone else. Your head may be too hard to be bitten and slash or devoured, but that doesn't make the idea of sticking it into one of these things any less disgusting.
Again, these are person-sized voracious giant worms. They're kind of… Yeah. At least they aren't too slimy as long as they keep their maws closed- adaptation to dry climates had them develop a tougher, almost leathery skin.
The Galactic Zone is infested by a bunch of robots, but dispatching Kate means they were all turned into scrap before long, to be gathered up by the scavenger robots meant to dig for anything of interest. Incidentally, she also went ahead and violently freed a suit of apparently 'high-tech' power armor from a display case while she was there to present it to you; turns out the Nuka-Cola Company had some close ties to the military in its time, for a reason you will go into later.
It's some solid armor with a bit of extra, to note that down, too. Runs on some more of the 'quantum' technology, giving it some extra power as long as it's intact. You have literally infinite energy at your fingertips whenever you may want it, of course, but you threw it in with the rest all the same.
Next off, 'Kiddie Kingdom' was infested by a bunch of ghouls and radioactive mist released all over it through some valves (what the fuck were they even using those things for to begin with), but a few waves of robots to take care of those was enough.
Sadly, aside from a whole bunch of radioactive material someone thought it wise to store underneath it where it since leaked and kind of created a green, toxic and highly irradiated sludge, the park attraction meant to specifically target younger kids doesn't have much of real interest to you within itself.
That said, what Nora found within the Safari Adventure place was very interesting indeed, by comparison. After swiftly disposing of a bunch of ghoul gorillas and some human living among them like some demented Tarzan reference, your pregnant wife (let's face it, you're basically married at this point) hacked and slashed her way through a bunch of badly mutated deathclaw analogues… Until she found her way to the source of their kind.
A cloning machine. Originally used to supply animals for the Safari Adventure attraction. What exactly these people were smoking you have no idea, but a low-risk way of creating new life that you can actually do some precision work with beyond throwing a minion at an ADAM/FEV mix and waiting is very much going to be analyzed and copied for later.
Seriously, you can actually create animal hybrids with this thing. And, of course, just clone animals. In related news, they also had a whole bunch of animal DNA in cold storage- mostly, y'know, animals that one would think of when the word safari is in play, but hey, easy access to cloned alligators and gazelles is pretty sweet enough as is.
You'll be keeping those samples as well, of course.
Side note, it's weirdly sexy to watch a pregnant Nora sway left and right while handling unnecessarily long spears and swords like she did while securing this stuff.
Now, as for that military deal… John-Caleb Bradberton, founder and owner of the Nuka-Cola Company, actually cooperated with the US Military in order to achieve a means of biological immortality, having his company research chemical weaponry and the like, which was how Nuka Cola Quantum even came to be in the first place, just adjusted to not give people radiation burn on touch before hitting the market.
Sadly for him, the only thing he actually managed to keep alive was his head, kept conscious inside a small vault under his office for two centuries running, having gone through the amputation of the rest of his body shortly before the nukes fell.
He really should've considered keeping a way out for himself ahead of time. Now you're in that vault, having taking apart the security doors in the way to investigate that small blip on your blood-radar, and reading through the original Nuka Cola Recipe.
"Please… Just end this already…"
Yes, he's been begging to be ended ever since you came inside, but you have priorities here.
In your free time, you do make it a point to go around and keep up interpersonal relationships; that is, you talk to people. What with old habits and all that. It does help you've been successfully surrounding yourself largely with people you can stand and yes men to keep up your burgeoning little empire for you, so it's not as much of a chore as it was in high school.
Jeez, but high school was a pain to live through. It was fine at the start, but by your third year you had to regularly run like you were part of track and field.
Partly because the track girls were coming after you and say what you want, but being detained in their changing room all day was not how you liked to spend your afternoons, much as the nonstop sex with sporty chicks was fun the first time around.
The American education sector is one brutal environment. There's a reason you're planning to homeschool your kids.
But back to your daily relationship upkeep, you and Kate actually decided to do a thing. It involves sitting in one room naked while fanning each other some air, lying in wait for Cait to come by.
This plan is genius, okay? It's worked for you every time.
"… What'd I walk in on this time?" The vaguely Irish redhead asks, eyes veering off towards the bar you built into the room to make sure you got all bases covered (which was also why you were so sure she'd come here) like she's already considering getting herself drunk.
"Oh, we were just sooo bored," you mime waving boredom away, "just sitting here waiting for something interesting to happen."
Kate, unsure whether to grimace or honestly chuckle at the farce you're putting on, rolls her eyes with a grin in the end. "Hey Cait, wanna fuck together?"
The old 'have another woman invite them in'. Works for sisters, though not twins, mothers, daughters, club members, bullies, bully victims…
"Are you seriously trying to get me hanky'in like this?" Cait asks bluntly.
Cait walked on over to the counter, leaning over it to grab a bottle of spirits- the good shit they had here, that got you drunk and left you without a bleeding nose the day after, taking a good, long swig.
Or maybe it was just whatever the big honcho'd done to her that made it healthier to get fucked in the head. An' speaking of getting fucked…
Nah, she needed more. Cait took the time to drain the stuff you could sell for, like, a hundred caps before she looked back at the two of 'em.
Throwin' the glass back where it'd come from, she licked her lips, tasting somethin' she didn't care about as her eyes did the same to the two tight bodies lazing around.
Gabriel was all muscle and no fat, almost slender if 'slender' meant being built like a deathclaw, just built for runnin' and killin' all day, smirking at her from his handsome face. It was in the jawline, she thought, or maybe just her smashing jaws for so long she always looked there first.
Not that she didn't have lots to look at on him. His pecs and abs were on full display, pleasantly bulging biceps looking tasty enough to bite (irony, that) and his cock just out there as well, big, half-hard but still bigger than half the 'bigshots' she'd seen the uglies of.
It was completely hairless, not that Cait was surprised, with veins all over it but none of them freakishly large or anything, and his two big, round balls were resting under it.
No wonder, guy had balls for days.
Next to him, watching her back with lidded eyes, Kate was resting, arms crossed and leaning against her boyfriend. The woman wasn't any less muscled than Gabriel, both of them reminding her of predators somehow, but her abs were less pronounced, the curves of her body distracting from them.
And her tits. Kate had many things and a big pair of girls was among them.
Thick thighs that could crush a head like a grape, Cait thought, and a confident, fearless grin that she knew from being around her a lot.
Also, again, not a single hair growing below her eyebrows, so she could see everything.
Cait grabbed another bottle. "Fuck it, I'm in," she said before her brain could think better of getting anywhere near the monsters when they were naked.
Then the world tilted like a motherfucker and she dropped her booze.
"Hey!"
"Knew you'd see things our way," Gabriel smirked as he grabbed for her, Kate joining in and peeling her clothes off.
Fucking smartass.
Once she was naked, neither of the monsters in the room waited around before getting grabby with her, hands roaming Cait's body all over. "She's been getting better, hasn't she?" Kate asked, poking at her side.
It was kinda ticklish.
"That's what thralling will do to you," her male counterpart drawled. "And she's not complaining for once, either, is she?"
"I'm gonna if you two keep doing that," she pointed out, twisting where she was being dragged on his lap. "What brought this on anyway?"
"Oh, we were just bored and decided you were something fun to do."
"I noticed how you look at me when we're doing something together, you know," Kate added.
Okay, so Cait was gonna enjoy the eye candy, duh. Kate was hot, 'specially when she blew stuff up.
Grunting, she shook her head, sitting down. Enough talk now, she had something more important to do.
Grabbing for Gabriel's dong behind herself, she could feel its warm hardness pulsing on her palm. It took no time at all to nudge herself back, sliding it up against her pussy and sinking down on it.
Like everything about the man, it was a little overwhelming, his cock thick enough to make her stretch just right. This was a good one.
Meanwhile, Kate was joining the two of them, facing Cait with a grin on her face. "You know, I always thought you'd have freckles here, too," she said, taking Cait's tits in her hands and flicking her nipples with her thumbs. "Good to see I'm right."
Her reaction was to to do the same to Kate's bigger puppies, biting her teeth for a sec because Gabriel was hitting somewhere inside of her that made it hard to talk.
Then there she was, his strong hands on her hips as she rode him, bouncing on his cock and making out with his girlfriend, lips locked and loaded. It was insane just how smooth and soft her skin could be with the hard muscle underneath, and the thorough screwing coming from below just made her gasp into her mouth on top.
Then the tongue pushing into Cait's mouth became longer somehow, almost choking her with surprise at the same time the guy behind her licked all over her ear, breathing into it softly.
So she juiced all over his lap. Then, once she could move again, his arms wrapped around her waist in full, keeping her in place while-
Kate disappeared, the reappeared, holding onto a piece of black stuff and straps in the shape of…
She slid it on, revealing it was double-ended dildo with a harness meant to fit around her hips. "Hey Gabe, mind nudging over a bit?"
"If I must," he chuckled, lifting Cait up by her thighs until his cock, wet and glistening with her juices, was out.
"Whoa, hey, I didn't consent to no butt stuff," she protested when his strong arms moved her just a bit.
"But you didn't not, either," Kate said, kneeling on the big couch in front of both of them, looking her in the eyes while her hands directed the dildo between Cait's legs.
Hammer logic there. She couldn't say much against that.
"Is that one of the ones based off my own dick?" Gabriel asked as it slid into her, pushing and thrusting into Cait's wet tunnel, but she was kinda more worried about the prick now pushing up against her rosebud.
"Fuuuck," she squeezed out when it slowly pushed into her, filling her from the front and back both.
"I think someone's liking what they're getting," Kate smirked, kissing the side of her jaw. The other side was taken up by Gabriel in short order, too, and it felt like no inch of her body went untouched by the two.
Cait panted, uncontrolled, and clung to the woman in front of her as her ass was slowly being fucked, the toy in her pussy keeping up a rhythm with it to flood her with feelings. Her legs were spread wide, feet resting somewhere at the small of Kate's back, while she received her first actually good buttfuck.
She could feel both of them moving around inside her, rubbing against each other and sparking out her brain. They were speeding up, now, still making out with her and each other while using her like a toy herself.
"Fuck!" She cried out when she felt herself coming close again. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuuuck!"
Her joints locked up, the tightness in her ass getting bigger, too. It felt amazing, being forced open and filled up like that, and with Kate fucking her pussy, too, she came again, twitching and screaming and all.
Gabriel was coming, too. She could feel the twitching of his cock when she paid attention, the pulsing of hot cum through it and into her ass, filling her up balls-deep with heavy pumps of the stuff.
She was kissing Kate, then she was kissing him, then the room turned around her and she was sitting the other way around, facing him, her cum-leaking ass pointed to Kate this time.
"Hope you're ready, because we ain't gonna let you go before you're done."
She couldn't tell who'd said that. Heck, maybe it was both of them.
Same difference. Cait finally found something better than getting smashed before a big fight.
Your work with Curie continues being close and intimate during your remaining stay on Earth Fallout, of course, increasingly focused around the flora of the wasteland and how it may be modified once she put her universal antidote idea on the backburner for the moment; apparently, your efforts on genetically modifying crops and useful plants was so impressive to her she vowed to support the project.
Well, you really only wanted a bit of useful stuff, but if she wants to influence the kinds of green now growing all over the place around where you've been forcefully reinstating sane weather conditions, you sure aren't going to stop her.
Hence one wing of your eastern laboratory complex has been graced with the results of her ongoing research and modifications. She even went and asked Taylor for help in retrieving underwater flora over the telepathic network after seeing her thought-vids of swimming through the massively irradiated ocean.
The results speak for themselves.
But that's not the main reason you're seeking her out today. Instead, you carefully navigate around a bush that may or may not be able to rip off human limbs (she also did take inspiration from the samples you brought back from the Glowing Forest) in order to find her inside the greenhouse she improvised out of her research and have a little talk.
Said little talk takes place in front of a control panel beyond which a test subject (a molerat) is slowly being digested by a giant abomination of a root network. "Hey Curie, got a moment?"
"Oui, I am merely observing 'ow the vermin removal prototype is performing," she says, turning around towards you. "What is it?"
"You're aware of the whole dimensional travel thing I'm regularly doing, right?" The question is largely for show, of course; you know very well who has access to what parts of the network, keeping anyone outside your inner circle from accessing anything tagged as pertaining to content from outside this dimension, and Curie has free access to that stuff. Meaning she's almost guaranteed to have seen it, give her opinion on furthering knowledge in all forms.
"Oui, oui, Earth Bet is a most exciting place! The sociological implications of superpowers in practice are fascinating, as is a scientific community numbering more than ten!" The redhead Curie has become slides a strand of errant hair back behind her ear. "Is this about your approaching return?"
"It is," you nod easily. Thankfully, she's looked into this stuff, so you don't have to explain it… Again. It kind of became stale after the third time you did. "There's a free spot and I could think of no-one else I'd rather have along, if you're interested."
"Magnifique!" Forgetting about her previous task, she smiles at you as she begins pacing in circles. "I will need to pack some luggage, nothing much due to weight concerns, but a trip like this is something to be cherished! Where did I put my swimsuit again?"
Well, long as she's having fun. Huh, kind of your catchphrase these days, isn't it?
Another individual you work a lot with is, naturally, Isabel; while you don't spend an overwhelming amount of time modifying your robots over and over again (maybe later, you just did a bit of minor updating on their schematics already), that isn't her only strength as an engineer.
Or person, for that matter. You do appreciate your people and want them to know that whenever possible.
In this particular case however, you're trying to help her overcome a small, almost undetectable really, flaw in her daily living habits. It's really nothing momentous, just- Well, Isabel rarely, if ever, goes outside, even more so than Sherrel. Seeing as you're making Sherrel the measure of basic mental health for tinker- and engineering-inclined individuals, clearly something needed to be done.
The 'something' in this case being a way to incentivize her to go outside and do stuff more often. And really, what would work better for that than a suit of custom power armor she can play with both at home and when away?
"You really don't have to do this?"
"I want to," you assert. "If you know you're wasting it, you'll naturally want to use it instead just because it's there. Basic psychology."
"Please, I promise I'll just go out shopping or whatever?"
"Nope, power armor now." You have made your decision and it stands. You won't let Isabel back out of this one.
For all her initial reluctance, she also does get into it pretty quickly; her natural drive to learn about, and even improve technology when possible shines through easily whenever she's baited with anything like this.
So you go ahead and rig up a decent design that'll see her safe. And, you being yourself, cram all the technology you can into it to turn it into mobile, nearly person-sized heavy artillery. That flies, because you're long past the point of making anything not fly.
The color scheme doesn't take long to be decided, either, as despite preexisting ones being a thing Isabel actually would prefer something with lots of white and maybe blue, as a counterpoint of the retro robot look she used in her Mechanist phase, and so you just go with that, with an overall design concept of something more sleek, yet powerful looking than the typical power armors found around Earth Fallout.
There's a few ups and downs during the design process, but overall you make efficient use of both your time and finally produce what you hope to be a good base model for Isabel to work with.
How's it up there, everything good? You ask over telepathy, as you don't want to bother shouting all the way. You're still physically present, of course; should anything happen, you can always jump up really hard to save Isabel, much as you don't expect that to be possible.
Still, always better to be sure.
I'm, uh, I'm good, she sends back. Navigation and acceleration work like intended.
Great. Now try out the wings, I've marked practice targets for you.
How'd you even do that? The joys of having everything connected wirelessly. You may be in trouble if anyone ever figures out how to hack your tech, but, well… You did take some precautions in that regard already. Uhm, here goes, I guess.
The wide wings at her armor's back spread out smoothly, targeting being done semi-automatically once the targets have been confirmed by the user, and the four blue barrels glow with power as energy is routed along them.
Four white-hot lances of energy fire off, twisting and curving through the air due to the forces at play between each other before they impact the old ruins you marked for Isabel, exploding with percussive force strong enough to shake the earth, if mildly.
The majority of the targets is obliterated outright. Good, good.
Go on, we need to ensure successive shots don't cause any malfunctions. This is totally part of your secret plan to motivate Isabel by introducing her to the joys of causing reckless destruction at will, one of the few things that really motivate you to tear yourself off your lovers every day.
Proving your and Isabel's engineering extremely overdone once again, she follows suit, bombarding the small cluster of former buildings with her energy lances rated for both anti-ground and anti-air combat. They blow pretty much everything apart.
Take that, laser mortars! Tinkertech ain't got nothing on you now.
That's not all, however. Of course you didn't just outfit this power armor with four independently firing long-range matter disintegrating energy weapons set into its two wings and superior (by human standards) physical capabilities; that would be stupid.
And now try the alternate firing mode, you suggest, having been satisfied by the rubble the rusted scraps you chose to use for this were reduced to.
Are you sure?
Go for it.
Weapons are made to be used. That's the whole point of making them. If you didn't want to blow everyone and everything in your way to smithereens, you wouldn't have bothered constructing giant robot armies.
The wings on Isabel's armor transform, folding up and becoming bulkier, heavier-looking, now glowing with power all over as every Eldritch Core you implanted into this thing goes online simultaneously.
No telling how many you put in there~.
A visible halo of power gathers around her now, charging up to maximum capacity. Then, in a sudden, explosive motion, the wings fan out, arching bolts of energy gathering into a single point of power.
The physics of this are really wonky, by the way, it was hard to get it right.
Then, the mass of physics-violating juice shoots out, becoming a consistent beam of destruction directed at the site already shot to pieces earlier.
Conspicuously, the nearby trees do not, in fact, lose all their leaves. Only about half of them. The shockwave travels through the air, impacting you like a wall smashing against your whole body. Also like a wall, it breaks against yor resistance, but you are indeed pushed back a bit as the ground you're standing on simply cannot sustain the forces involved here.
You still don't break posture. Doing this kind of thing with style is, like, half your fighting training's ultimate purpose these days.
As for the testing range, there's a crater. It is quite molten.
Pretty good, pretty good. Next off you'll still have Isabel try out flying in various weather conditions, though, she needs to be able to actually fly this thing if she wants be a mobile dispenser of destruction and slash or war crimes.
Your next stop, after Isabel, is to go grab Taylor to have a little talk from where she's just roaming the wasteland making a point to incorporate or murder anything even vaguely threatening and contributing the meat of the mammals to Concord, funnily enough, not wanting to just let it go to waste.
Well, parts of it. She also does feed a bunch to her bugs and seems to be collaborating with Curie to replace the insects present around the place up to now on a large scale.
Because screw being sensible or slow, let's just replace an entire biosphere by force. There's a reason you try to keep an eye on your girls most times; just imagine if Cupcake got it in her head to replace half of all fluids she found with chocolate or something and then found a way to actually do it.
You're handing out immense cosmic powers left and right, you can't generally rule out someone won't surprise you, is what you're saying.
But hey, Taylor's a good girl and Curie is generally helpful, so you don't mind letting them do as they please unless Curie starts to exhibit signs of mad scientist syndrome (which you have just made up).
But yeah, Taylor. 'Porting her up to the Titan where you're kind of moving a lot of daily necessities to, you sit her down and offer her a drink of blood before you begin with that little talk you were planning on having.
Once everyone's seated and you've confirmed there's no one else around right now (you don't have any permanent personnel on the Titan but your people can come and go as they please, naturally), you finally speak up, still of the opinion that things like this are best settled out loud rather than over telepathy- it feels more intellectually honest than just pushing your thoughts at the other person when you're trying to have a proper talk, is all.
"So, Taylor, I wanted to ask you about what you want to do once we're back on Earth Bet," you begin bluntly.
"The same as I've been doing," she returns with the same amount of hesitation- none.
"And if that's all, good enough," you shrug. "I just wanted to make sure. If you wanted to go to school again or at least get a degree on the sly, we could have arranged that, too."
Taylor visibly stills when the topic of school comes up, though whether out of surprise or annoyance you can't tell. "No. Nothing like that. My future is already certain and I don't need to graduate for it, so there's no point."
You nod. That was about what you were expecting; if she wants to learn something, Taylor can just do it, probably using the Necronomicon to do it, too. Still you reach a hand over towards her, taking a hand into your own. "Got it. Would you still like a degree or two, though? I know you qualify for one in Engineering, it'd take Sarah maybe a few minutes to set something up."
You expect, anyway. It's not like your sister has been making a habit of this stuff.
"I…" She needs a moment to think about it, probably really thinking about the implications of her transplanted knowledge for the first time now. "I think I would like that," Taylor finally nods.
"Alright, I'll stencil it in," you agree. It shouldn't be much of a bother. "That aside, are you really sure you don't want to be homeschooled at least? I know I'm not one to talk, I've forgotten the majority of stuff I learned at school," or at least lessons part of the curriculum, "but basic education could come in handy."
"No need." She seems resolute about this. "Anything I need to know I either already do or can learn quickly. I kill people well enough already."
"Mhm," you agree noncommitally. "Alright, I'll drop it already. That aside, are you looking forward to seeing your pets again? Maybe thinking about completing your set?"
Your teasing tone is there for a reason. You gently poke at Taylor for a while longer, eventually coaxing her into hopping onto your lap where you can pat her head and just cuddle.
Taylor responds really well to physical intimacy like that. You should know, she always seems a little happier afterwards, even if she doesn't express that in any way.
"Cute little murderbug."
She looks up at you, then away again.
She doesn't say anything about your new name for her. You take that as an endorsement.
Nora has always been beautiful. For as long as you've known her, she's been shapely, pretty, basically overall attractive far as humans went and she's only become more so after being vamped by you.
And if anything, pregnancy has only made her even more beautiful. Her big, rounded belly doesn't seem to be inconveniencing her in the slightest, carried with the grace and strength only an above-human organism can produce.
Still you feel like you should do something nice for her… And, while you're at it, interview her on her experiences with being pregnant so far. Just to make sure you have her account and can compare it against others' later on.
Hence you are thoroughly oiling her up right now, lavishing perfumed oil all over her body. Let nobody say you don't take care of your lovers in every which way you can.
"You know, if everyone did this, I'm sure humanity would just explode in numbers," Nora informs you as you work your way all along her legs and toward her feet, one bit at a time and switching sides frequently. "Feels absolutely heavenly."
"Glad to know you like it," you smirk up at her. Hey, you yourself also do like this, just to make it clear. There's just something about digging your fingers into tense muscles and kneading them into relaxation that's deeply satisfying- even if vampires don't actually get knots in their muscles like humans would, it's still just very nice to do, you feel. "So, about that comparison… ?"
"Right, right. I've never really thought about it that deeply, but I'm the only one among us that's given birth before as a human, aren't I?"
"That we know of, anyway," you shrug jokingly. And for the sake of being as truthful as possible. "But yes."
"Mmm…" Nora stretches, letting you lift her legs to really dig your thumbs into the soles of her feet. Which you promptly do. "There's a few differences. First off, none of the usual health issues. No morning sickness, no thick feet, the kicking isn't bad and stopped very quickly and I would bet I won't have any stretch marks. Overall, vampire pregnancy is much easier and more pleasant, I would recommend it."
"Good to know," though you don't exactly intend to try it out for yourself, this is good news for everyone else, at least, "and how about the hormones? Did you notice any behavioural changes?"
You've eaten a lot of people. Some among them were doctors. Of course you have a little bit of miscellaneous knowledge on all of this stuff.
"Not that I've noticed. Maybe I'm a little more listless from time to time? I've taken up wandering the area around Sanctuary and inside of Concord, just to look around." Note to self, pregnancy may or may not make vampires more territorial, subconsciously. "If anything, the most I've noticed is increased hunger. I'm drinking nearly thrice as much blood a day now, it's been slowly increasing, but we obviously haven't had any issues with supply."
"'Eating for two', except more, huh?" The truth is, of course, that pregnant women tend to require not so much twice as much food as an adjusted diet to cover for certain metabolic changes, but feeding a pregnant woman whatever she wants is generally a good idea.
Wouldn't want to lose fingers to a sudden craving, after all.
Meanwhile, you're moving around to Nora's back, sliding your warm fingers over it and digging in to the sides of her spine, occasionally moving around to cover her belly in even more oil. "Ooh, this is good… I haven't really noticed anything else out of the ordinary. I feel our child there, of course, but I can move around without any burden. Sometimes I think I feel her mind, too, teetering on the edge of being there, but I'm not sure."
Hmm… Now isn't that interesting. Still, you have a woman to lavish luxury on, so you'll concentrate on that for now. Any possible implications of this have been waiting until now, they can keep waiting a little longer.
Okay, maybe this idea did sound better in your head, before you tried to put it into practice. The difference between theory and practicals, as it were. Still, you've started this, you won't stop until it works.
"Ha-yaaah!" A flying Cupcake comes at you, speed and strength enhanced beyond the usual enhancements all your thralls get by various potions. You just sigh, sidestepping her reckless attack and wrapping an arm around her waist to catch her and whirl her around to face you.
"I told you, you have to think before you attack," you scold her. "Get your stance down first, then use the force you can push through it. What even was that?"
"It was my secret combo finisher?" She asks, happily wagging her legs back and forth where you're holding her.
"It was sloppy, that's what," you correct her. "Come on, I know you can do better than that."
"Mmmkay, I'll try." You know she will. For a minute or two. Then she will act out again and require more encouragement.
It's actually surprisingly predictable.
"Again, stance, move your feet and hips to punch, the rest will come by itself." Cupcake, it has to be said, is exceedingly uncoordinated- her control over her own body is just spectacularly bad, for all that she's surprisingly flexible. She just doesn't do half the things most people do automatically when moving parts of their bodies.
How she manages to walk on a straight line on a daily basis is beyond you.
"Yah!" She throws a sloppy punch standing on the exercise mattress (you covered the whole room with them, actually, because you know how these kinds of things usually turn out). She… She's less rotating her waist than she is thrusting her whole upper body into it, but she's trying.
"You're getting better. Still not good, but better. Here," you say, holding the side of her hips, "try again and I'll guide you a bit."
"Are we doing lewd stuff already?" She asks, hopefully.
"Not yet. You have to earn it first." Motivation must be acquired through any means necessary. "Now c'mon, give it another try!"
"Why can't I just use the book?"
"Because my skills and methodologies wouldn't work for someone your size-"
"Hey!"
"-and I want you to earn that perfect punch with all your enhancement potions to paste people. This is your big dream, Cuppie." You do, naturally, talk over her faked indignance at being called out on being a shortie.
Fear the man (or woman) that's practiced a single punch a thousand times. Except it, uh, takes more than a thousand tries for her to get a feel for this.
You still get her to the point she can competently throw a good, solid punch, though. Her height means she'll naturally target the average enemy's stomach or crotch, of course, but that's not really a hindrance far as you're concerned.
Of course not the entirety of your remaining time was taken up playing around and happily chatting and getting intimate with your lovers, though you can't say you aren't happy doing what else you're doing, either.
Currently, that means you're piloting the Titan, hundreds and thousands of tons of flying warship wreathed in a cloak of dark clouds, far and wide enough to blanket the entirety of its bulk against the setting sun.
You're going out of your way to do this at the most appropriate time of the day you could think of. Just for theatrical reasons, really. Given your kind of nocturnal nature, it just makes sense- evening is to you what the rising sun is to a living person, broadly speaking, though even this amount of sun would be lethal if you weren't immune to it by now.
You're standing in your control room, keeping an eye on the various systems and cameras meant to provide you an overview of Titan's operations at all times and simultaneously exerting your grasp over the weather to maintain the cloud cover enveloping it.
The robots are ready, swarms upon swarms of them equipped with their own Lutece Particle-devised flight modules, as are the weapons systems and the little extra you're planning on using.
You could have called for the others to be with you right this moment, but you felt it was for the best that you stad here, now. Alone. Overseeing this little cleanup, that's all it is by this point.
Below you the nuke-ravaged and war-torn ruins of Boston rise toward the sky, skyscrapers and buildings of all kinds and sizes, many of which are completely destroyed, but even more still endure, housing the various little problem cases now populating the city within themselves. You have already marked the two places that actually have any civilians inside them around these ruins- Diamond City and Goodneighbour- as well as the most common routes traders would take, not that anyone with any sense is likely to be moving around much this late in the day.
All systems are good to go, engines are in condition to operate, it looks like everything went well. Nodding, satisfied, you flick a few switches.
One by one the spotlights of the Titan activate, shining down on the ground like ghostly apparitions from the sky, their bright glare illuminating the first few targets you're thinking of just taking out entirely; supermutants aren't really tasty, so you may as well give this thing a test spit. Then you conjure up a mighty, almost clearly supernatural wind, an even force blowing against your mighty capital of a major modern general airship to reveal it to the world.
More than you already did, anyway. And yes, that was a reference because you have some actual class, thank you very much.
You can see the confusion at the ground, now, and the panic beginning to set in among the beings down below. Supermutants point and roar, a few of them trying to shoot at the Titan from down on the ground; none of their still very much handheld weaponry has the reach to come anywhere near your forcefield, however. Raiders shout amongst one another, a few fights breaking out and corpses piling up here and there as they take cover or gather up to do… Something, you have no idea what their strung-out minds may be thinking now.
Ghouls continue to lie still or amble around, uncomprehending of anything this far from their locations. You even spy a few hundred of them inside a crater of some kind, your sensors suggesting it may have been a smaller nuke with all the radiation inside.
The mirelurks populating a small part of the city and the miscellaneous giant insects don't really understand what's going on either, though the atmosphere of approaching doom seems to have been grasped even by them, or at least the activity among the other threats around the place is riling them up.
You even see a few deathclaws, hurriedly pushing out of whatever buildings they were resting inside of and rushing out of the city. The things were always uncannily smart for how mindlessly aggressive and hungry they are.
However, you have better things to do that pontificate about useless shit when instead you could mark the appropriate targets on the dynamic strategic map contained within your office, for lack of a better word, aboard the Titan.
Which you do.
You wonder whether these ants below you can see the movement across the Titan's underside and walls, the thousands of enormous weapons directed at them. If they do, you hope they have just enough time to realize how fucked they are before you press on 'fire'.
A thousand stakes of metal are accelerated beyond the speed of sound at once. They are large, not enormously so but their length and just general size means that the impacts, once they happen, blast away entire buildings from their origin points, waves of force simply demolishing everything nearby as they turn any potential enemies into not so much dead bodies as it is a pulp.
Then you fire the next set of weapons. This time, you target the surviving structures and less palatable creatures, thick, red beams of energy melting the earth an dthe rubble and the living beings they meet. Anything with the bad luck to be nearby them is flash-fried in their intense heat, but direct hits more just vaporise anything in their paths.
And then you fire off your main weapon, just for good measure.
A good section of Boston is gone in the blink of an eye. An impossible light falls upon it, something like stars shining within, and everything in the general area ceases to be- only then does a massive dose of energy wipe out anything nearby, disintegrating everything within a very generous radius entirely.
In the end, you create an even bigger crater where the last one used to be. Good riddance to all of those ghouls, anyway.
Now you send out your robots, ordered to take prisoners and dispose of anything you dislike eating. There will be many wounded and fleeing, after all, so no better time to pick through the rubble than now.
In the meantime you will continue to shoot the railguns at a few more targets of opportunity here and there, just for fun. This, you believe, should cement your superiority over this wasteland nicely.
It isn't long before your robots, disgorged from the Titan's openings in great masses that might look like almost solid waterfalls from the ground, begin to return intermittently, carrying with them the wailing and screaming prisoners they have stuffed into great cages, largely grasped between the spiked legs of the SP1D3Rs you have dispatched for this task.
Ah, the choirs of the damned are always so very pleasant to listen to.
'Lo, and behold, the Lord saith, the instrument of my wrath. For though many may be, not all may remain, but all that reject my word shall reap what they have sown.
So the unbelievers and the heretics shall fear the skies and the earth, for above them a Titan strides through the clouds, its steps shaking the ground under the weight of His gaze.
Its hands and its feet shall crush them as its tongues shall devour them, that no trace may remain of their earthly bodies as no trace remains of their selves wherever His gaze stretches.
Yet ye faithful and ye believers shall know no fear, for thou art as though cradled in His embrace under the Titan's shadow, safe as a babe in the embrace of its mother.
And His people shall pray on their knees three times; and as they pray, receive salvation.
For the first prayer is the destruction of their foes, the end of all pursuance by the unjust and the unknowing.
For the second prayer is the sacrifice made by any that came before them, that they may gaze upon the Promised Land on the back of the Titan.
For the third prayer is a call to celebration, for the Lord hath arrived to bestow upon them paradise. Salvation is at hand.
And the unbelievers shall be taken and split into two parts; one part shall be returned to the world, that their souls may be sent on and earn their salvation elsewhere, and one part shall be shown the Mercy of the Lord, that they experience truth in darkness and freedom in bondage.
Some lucky few may be brought upon the ultimate pasture, whence all beings shall return to at the end of all times. Praise the Lord! For these words are written nowhere else.
And so as the Lord reigns over the heavens, so does he reign over the earth. As above, so below.'
-Excerpt from a certain Holy Book
Fun fact, the logistics of teleportation are a lot simpler and easier when you have two rooms of roughly equivalent size whose relative position to a teleporter is generally fixed and you can simply plug in the coordinates and go from there. Not that you couldn't figure out ways to deal with the issue before you build a giant floating city, it's just one of the many small quality-of-life improvements you incorporated into it during the planning phase.
That certainly did make processing the subjects you had captured all over Boston much, much easier. Sure, a considerable amount of raiders probably still died to your bombardments, but you took more than enough with you to cover just about any needs you may have for a good long while.
They're already being 'taken care of' by the robots and autodocs you had set up for that purpose. Just paralyzed and strapped into blood extraction pods or else cryocapsules for long-term storage.
What can you say; you like to have a bit of a reserve going in case you need a bunch of test subjects for some reason or your current blood bags die out due to old age or something.
You never did go out of your way to halt the whole aging thing for them, after all. Currently the only ways to do something like that in your possession would be either thralling them (which, no thanks, that's reserved for prisoners you actually care about and may or may not want to flip) or else that one tonic based on your own physiology… Which is a risk in itself.
Also, kind of a pain.
Eh, who cares, if they die, they die; there's always more where they came from, after all, and if need be you can always tax your population for blood or something.
Now, though, now you're sitting back in a newly restored drive-in movie theater, carrying a bunch of buckets full of popcorn you've made (sugared, of course, it isn't really popcorn if you don't cover it in a thin coating of pure sweetness) and watching as Curie rides herd on Cupcake.
Next to them, Isabel half-heartedly tries to help out, poking the short little whirlwind back into place every now and then, while Taylor, Nora and Kate are already lounging on the arrangement of couches you put on a (literal) pedestal in front of the screen.
It's not just any night- it's movie night. You may 'only' have a couple hundred movies even vaguely interesting enough, but that won't stop you!
"Okay everyone, who wants some popcorn? I made it fresh with the corn from around here, so let me know how it tastes," you request.
And just like that, you march straight into the storm of your lovers, all of which are intent on getting their share. Time to do the thing.
Watching the pirated Aleph version of Star Wars, for one. That one never gets old.
The rest of your exploits as your time rapidly dwindles down are nothing too special, truth be told; a few hours go into being part of a delegation to Goodneighbour to establish the fact that the 'city' (it's even less of one than Diamond City, really) is under the Minutemen's protection and won't kick up too much of a fuss.
Normally, that might be a bit more complicated than just going there and telling them as much; their entire point as a community originally was, after all, to tell assholes in authority to go screw themselves after the majority of them got kicked out of Diamond City for being ghouls, with the ones sympathetic and lawless enough to agree flocking to them as well.
However, the neighbourhood that was taken over by Goodneighbour still is inside of Boston and you kind of blew up everything in sight around it without touching the large settlement itself, and that demonstration of force seems to have done the trick in being convincing, much as the mayor, a ghoul going by the name of John Hancock, is playing over that best he can.
But look, literally raining destruction from the heavens of a whim kind of drives the point of you being on the 'not fuckable with' list home very hard.
Aside from that, you actually found yourself a Chinese submarine with some interesting stealth tech hidden inside the harbor, based off of some irregular readings your instruments up on the Titan gave you. Completely invisible, undetectable by sound or electromagnetism- basically invisible inside the ocean. The only reason you even noticed it was because it still reflects warmth and is actually really close to the surface, so once the sun shined down on the area you could make out a small heat spot.
It was still slight enough you nearly overlooked it entirely, but you had a few minutes and decided to check it out.
The crew got ghouled a long time ago because apparently, the Chinese didn't bother properly making the nuclear reactor driving the thing. Sloppy engineering, is what you're calling it, but hey, to each his own.
One of them wasn't even feral, but you killed him off anyway just so he wouldn't get in the way of you taking this thing apart to figure out how to camouflage stuff on an even larger scale than the Stealth Boys do.
… There's actually a lot of overlap between those and this stuff, actually. Chances are high that this whole stealth tech thing was just copied from the Chinese in the first place.
Figure that, huh.
As far as places in Boston you didn't summarily destroy, there's really only a few- Diamond City and its surroundings, the aforementioned Goodneighbour, a handful of neighbourhoods you preferred to keep intact because raiders to be captured were in or around them or that just had some handy resources for you to plunder…
Hey, just because you have effectively infinite amounts of anything you can use as a raw resource for some kind of manufacturing doesn't meant you aren't going to be a greedy shit about this still.
One of the locations you actually took a particular interest in, however, is, well…
It's a sailing ship that somehow managed to get stuck on dry land next to a river running through Boston, with a pair of rockets strapped to its rear.
Yeah.
The reason you're actually bothering to go and visit this place in person, as opposed to just having everything dismantled and any relevant data saved for later review like usual is that, contrary to your expectations (and common sense), your robots actually established diplomatic ties with its inhabitants- which are, themselves, robots.
You didn't even know they could do that, and you're the guy who made them! You have no idea why, but for some reason every time you create a massive army of semi-intelligent autonomously learning robots, they somehow manage to find ways to surprise you with the things they end up learning and doing.
Anyway, going out of your way to descend from the Titan, physically, for once, you are greeted by a colorful conglomeration of robots, headed by a sentry bot a report on your phone titled 'Captain Ironsides'.
Again, you were completely unaware your robots could even write reports. Sure, it's literally written by a virtual intelligence and nigh unintelligible, but what the hell?!
The robots salute you, a few fire in the air, even, as a replacement for cannon fire, and before long you're in the captain's cabin, as apparently you are being recognized as a sovereign entity by the last commanding officer of the US military.
Because that's how Captain Ironsides sees it, apparently. He's part of the military, the military in general has been extinguished to the best of his knowledge and so he's also the highest-ranking officer left, even after reprogramming the other robots on this tourist trap of a ship.
He's since had them build those rockets to get sailing again and launch a retaliatory strike against China.
Yeah.
However, it seems your thorough removal of Boston's infrastructure has, in fact, impressed a measure of cautious respect in him, hence when your robots showed up and began beeping at his robots he instructed them to attempt diplomatic maneuvers, which in turn caused the distributed VI controlling them to try its hand at playing diplomat itself.
And… There you are. It's a good thing Ironsides is realistic enough to know that you could and would just wipe this ship out fairly easily, you suppose.
Anyway, now he just wants to figure out how to proceed; on the one hand, after you so kindly removed all the raiders in sight, his robots could just gather some more stuff and finish the rockets, letting them get back into the water and sailing off towards China. On the other hand, he apparently would be up for joining up with you, too, under the condition that he retains the rank of Captain and the military's old codes of conduct are observed, meaning you shouldn't kill civilians where cameras can see it.
In the end, you decide to accept the crew of the USS Constitution amongst your ranks, mostly because you're too amused at this whole situation. The details require a bit hammering out- you don't exactly intend to care about the whole military regulations thing, but it turns out Ironsides is open enough to negotiation on the topic.
As long as he gets to stay Captain, the US Constitution is at least considered in some capacity (his wording, not yours) and he gets a huge energy cannon, he's happy, ultimately.
Easy enough for you to provide. Also, man, his programming must've been shot to hell at some point, but then again he's a robot that's gained some level of self-awareness; they're rarely really as well put-together as Codsworth is.
Anyway, next time you return to Earth fallout, you'll have to look into upgrading both this robot, his ship and its crew, but for the moment you've gained another subordinate eager to defend capitalism against communist raiders and ghouls and whatever.
All in a day's work.
Concord, once merely one more series of ruins dotting the wasteland and only filled with a few rabid animals intent on devouring anything in sight, was quickly becoming the Commonwealth's dominant power with the greatest population density to be found throughout the entire area after it absorbed the majority of nearby settlements and welcomed scavengers and the like into its walls.
Its public order was upheld in equal parts thanks to the Minutemen, who took up a much more direct role in patrolling for and apprehending any criminals the moment they stepped out of line and the inhabitants, most of which were armed with better weaponry than most wasteland scum could afford to bear.
Ammunition prices were much more affordable now that they needed to fire much less often, after all, so pipe pistols and the odd pipe rifle were completely phased out in favor of more reliable guns amongst the populace.
Public schooling became common, along with a central orphanage organized to ensure the care of any children whose parents did not live to see the city's founding, with many missions executed by the Minutemen specifically going out of their way to save any such vulnerable individuals that may have been left to roam the wilds by themselves, and after the grand Concord Public Library was established, rising from the ruins of the Boston Public Library, many would go on to confirm that a second renaissance had come upon the people of Concord.
Many trades sprang up within this environment, flourishing or being abandoned on their own merits, and the long tradition of gladiatorial robot fighting originated during this early time period as well. The Grand Arena of Concord (GAC) was build using the many robots that, as stories were told, could erect an entire city in a day and a night.
Not that other settlements still existing were being ignored, either. As most organized threats throughout the land were systematically eradicated, many farms and lakes were being invested in as well, enlarging fields and constructing mirelurk ranches, brahmin ranches and others to ensure a stable food supply for the now rapidly growing population of this burgeoning empire.
Diamond City and Goodneighbour, as notable population centers before this, were allied with or soon would ally with this growing movement spearheaded by the Minutemen, the cesspool of danger that was the original city of Boston completely obliterated to ensure none shall threaten either of them forevermore, incidentally changing the courses of several trade routes now that the dangerous terrain had ceased to exist, instead quickly replaced by a new network of roads leading through the piles of salvage soon to be recycled.
The Glowing Forest, a very temporary threat turned into an asset through the power of science and the Lord, stretched across much of the southern Commonwealth in those days, slowly spreading out to cover the marshlands south of Boston and choke out the wild mirelurk populations often migrating through the area.
However, it has to be said that few of these developments were as fundamental of a paradigm shift as the Legions of Steel, those endless hordes of robots that…
-Excerpt from History of the Commonwealth, The Resettlement