Piper and Nora followed Nick out of the subway via a manhole exit, which led them directly out onto the street somewhere. (Not near Boston Common, fortunately). After singing the praises of being free, Nick turned to Nora. "So, how'd you know how to find me down in that old Vault?" he asked.

"Oh, your secretary, Ellie," Nora said. "She sent me." She frowned, then leaned in and whispered. "Hey, does she know you're a synth?"

Nick gave her another inscrutable look. "I suppose I should give her a raise… especially if she had to deal with you." He declined to answer the question about his synth-hood. "Now, you mentioned something about your missing son…"

"Oh yeah, here's the thing —" Nora began.

Nick lifted a hand to cut her off. "No, I want you to come down to my office in Diamond City. Give me all the details there. Besides, you've earned the chance to sit down and clear your head." He looked off into the distance. "Lord knows I have," he uttered under his breath.

"Okay," Nora agreed. "I'll meet you there!" But Nick had broken off into a dead run, one hand holding his hat firmly on his head, and probably missed her saying that.

XXX

"Oh, Piper, why don't you ever publish something happy? Why don't you write something nice for a change?" Piper was griping about the complaints she got from people in Diamond City about her newspaper. "It's enough to make me want to hang up my hat some days."

"Well, what the hell nice is there to write about?" Nora pointed out. "Another glorious day living in my fucking shack! Yippee, I get to step outside and take a nice deep breath of the human shit that's fertilizing my only source of food! Maybe if I'm lucky, Diamond City Security will fuck up and I'll get decapitated by a super mutant!"

"Exactly!" Piper said. "People need to know the truth! It might be scary, especially since the Institute could disappear Nat and me at any time, but it's worth it. The truth is what really protects us."

Nora nodded and extended her fist for a fist bump. Piper just looked at it, then at Nora, in confusion. Nora withdrew her fist in sadness — it seems another thing had been lost to time. "You're right, though," she agreed. "You have to know what you're facing so you can protect yourself and your loved ones." She shook her head. "If only I'd known that my Vault was a fucked up science experiment, and that someone would break in after a few hundred years and kill Nate and kidnap Shaun."

"I think Mama Murphy could have sucked up an ocean of jet and still never seen that one coming," Piper remarked. "But yeah, knowing even that ahead of time would have been better than a comforting lie." Piper then told Nora about growing up in a tiny little settlement, in a remote corner of the Commonwealth. It was sad as shit — her father killed by some dipshit who'd tried to sell out the settlement to raiders. Piper managed to get dipshit exiled and saved the settlement.

"Sorry about your dad," Nora said, once Piper finished telling the story.

Piper nodded, unshed tears in her eyes. "It was hard after he was gone, but just knowing that he died doing the right thing, that made it easier." Nora reached out and grabbed Piper's hand, giving it a squeeze. She didn't release it for a long time.

XXX

They elected to pass up Diamond City and head straight back to Sanctuary Hills, making good time despite all the heavy fucking bags of cement they were carrying around. When they arrived, Piper let her backpack slide off her shoulders and land with a solid thud next to the central workshop, groaning with relief. "Oh God, my spine!" she crowed. "I haven't felt this good since I printed my first paper!"

Nora let out her own relieved grunt as she dropped her heavy load. "Oof, even with a strong back, that was smarting something fierce those last few miles." She stretched out for a few moments, then turned to Piper. "Hey, how about we spend the night here before we head back to DC?" she suggested. "Not the District of Columbia," she specified.

Piper was bemused. "Why would I think you were talking about the old capital?" she asked rhetorically. She considered Nora's suggestion, then nodded. "Yeah, that'd be good. Sleep would do my aching back a world of good." She went into the same house she'd slept in last time and had barely taken off her hat and boots when sleep claimed her.

She woke up to an ominous thundering and an eerie pale green glow coming from outside. Well, no, what awoke her was Nora, who was crouched next to her bed and was repeatedly poking her in the ribs. "Piper, Piper, Piper," Nora repeated. "Wake up, Piper, Piper, come on, wake up." Her voice sounded just a notch below panicked.

Piper groaned. "Blue, what the fuck?" she grumbled.

"Uh, Piper, I think the world is coming to an end, again," Nora explained. "The sky's gone a funny color and my geiger counter is getting ornery —" There was a lightning strike somewhere outside, prompting a crackle from the tool embedded within Nora's Pip-Boy. "— there, see? I think it's End Times 2: Electric Boogaloo."

Piper fixed Nora with a baleful stare. "Blue, relax. It's just a radiation storm. They blow in from the Glowing Sea every so often. It'll blow over sooner or later. The world is not, I repeat, not coming to an end… again." She sighed, then sat up. "Well, I guess I'm fucking awake now," she grumbled.

"Sorry," Nora apologized.

Piper shook her head. "No, Blue, you didn't know. I guess they can be frightening to someone not used to them. This far north, they're not even worth taking shelter from. Diamond City, though…" She let the thought drop and looked at Nora, who still looked a little spooked, and threw out a line. "Since we can't leave Sanctuary Hills until it blows over, do you have any ideas about how we can pass the time?" She made her voice a little husky towards the end of the sentence, to drive the point home.

Nora brightened up. "Yeah, there's some tinkering I've been meaning to get done around the place," she said, oblivious. "Oh hey! You can go into the workshop and look around, see if there are any parts we could use to help fix up your printing press!"

Piper gave Nora a lopsided smile. Damn, her inability to see her very obvious come-on was cute. Frustrating, but cute. "Sure, Blue, that sounds like a wonderful way to spend our time."

A few hours later, after Nora had crossed the street and was elbows-deep into her work on the metal egg, she suddenly realized what she'd missed out on. "FUCK!"

XXX

When the storm had blown over, Piper had made good use of her time pawing through the assorted salvage, clutter, and outright junk that permeated the workshop area. She'd found a few mechanical parts that she felt had a good chance of playing nicely with her printing press, and she'd also found some pistols that matched her pistol model that had some nice attachments on them. She didn't know quite enough about guns to make her own, but taking them off other guns and adding to hers was an easy enough task. When she realized the ominous sounds of the radiation storm had died down, she poked her head out the door and smiled upon seeing blue skies.

She was about to start looking for Nora when Nora found her. "Piper, come on, I finished it, I fucking finished it!" She grabbed Piper by the arm and was tugging her along like a hyperactive kid at Nuka World.

"Finished what?" Piper said, giggling at Nora's enthusiasm.

"You've gotta see it, you've just gotta!" Nora said, either ignoring Piper or completely missing her question in her frenzy.

Piper allowed herself to be led to the now-finished building where the metal egg had stood. The egg was big enough to comfortably fit a person, and it suddenly struck Piper why the design was familiar. "Hey, is this a memory lounger, like they have in Goodneighbor?"

Nora looked at her in confusion. "I… don't know what that is," she admitted. "But come on, this is the fucking coolest!" She jogged over to a computer terminal next to the whatever-it-was, wires connecting the two (with a third leading outside to the generators powering Sanctuary Hills).

"Do I get inside it?" Piper asked.

"No, you don't." Piper turned and saw Preston Garvey leaning against the wall, looking shell-shocked and pale. "If you want my advice, Piper, just stay the hell away from that thing."

"Oh, you fuddy duddy, get out of here!" Nora shooed him away. "Go patrol the perimeter, Preston. If you see something fun and cool approaching the settlement, I'll know because you'll be screaming 'DIE, FUN THING!' and blasting away at it."

Garvey just shook his head and stopped briefly at the threshold of the building. "Last chance, Piper. Trust me."

Piper looked uncertainly from Garvey to Nora, then walked over and stood with Nora. "Sorry, Preston," she shrugged. "It can't be that bad if you survived it, right?"

He snorted. "Yeah, right, can't be that bad." He shook his head as he left the building.

"Okay, get ready for an incredible experience!" Nora grinned, once Garvey had left. She finished up on the computer terminal, then opened up the metal egg. Inside was a long seat, and she sat inside of it. "See you on the other side!" was the last thing she said before the lid closed down over her body.

"Okay…" Piper waited to see if there was something that was supposed to happen.

Then, without even so much as a blink, she found herself in a bizarre, almost nightmarish world. Everything around her was flat, just flat space as far as she could see, off to a distant horizon which glowed a bright green at all points of the compass. The ground itself wasn't featureless; it was covered in a rigid grid, light blue lines over a dark blue base. The sky was the same dark blue, but uniform in color — no grid.

"Piper!" Piper turned around to see Nora standing in front of a computer terminal and a red workbench, similar to the one in the Sanctuary Hills workshop. "Welcome to virtual reality!"

"What reality?!" Piper asked, a little on edge.

"Virtual reality!" Nora repeated. "A computerized simulation of reality that is, uh… beamed directly into your brain?" She tapped her chin with her index finger. "Not too sure how it works, exactly…"

"Yeah, question, how am I here if you were in the, uh, virtual reality thing?" Piper asked.

Nora just shrugged. "I dunno! Magic!" A manic grin was fixed on her face.

Piper gave Nora the stink eye. "You built this… this thing, and you don't even know how it works?" Nora just kept giving Piper a bright, almost vacant, grin. Piper groaned. "Okay, Blue, how did you know how to build this thing? Did you find the schematics somewhere?"

"Nope!" Nora said. "Just something I had in the back of my mind right when I came out of the vault!"

Piper pinched the bridge of her nose, hard. "Blue, do you realize how little damn sense that makes?"

"I guess, but I try not to think about it too much," Nora admitted. "This, and a few other little things."

"Like what?" Piper asked.

"Hey, do you wanna see something really cool?" Nora said, abruptly changing the subject. She turned and began typing away at the computer terminal.

Piper waited for a minute. "Blue, I'd really like —"

"Turn around!" Nora said cheerily, turning away from the computer.

Piper turned around. There were twelve extremely angry-looking deathclaws all arrayed in a semicircle behind her. "OH FUCK!" she screamed, reaching for her pistol, knowing it was completely futile, and realizing too late that she'd left it in that damned workshop. She raised her fists — to hell with just giving up, even with these insane odds — when she heard Nora coming up from behind her.

"WHEEEEEEEE!" Nora called out as she dived into the midst of the monsters. The deathclaws rushed her and tore into her. Piper screamed in horror… but then stopped, as she observed a distinct lack of blood, viscera, or limbs being strewn about. The great beasts were savaging damn near every square inch of her, but her skin wasn't even dimpling beneath their onslaught. "MOSH PIT!" she declared, a cultural reference lost upon Piper.

Piper tentatively walked toward the fray and poked one of the deathclaws. It felt real — hell, it smelled real. It turned to her and decided she was a tastier — and more convenient — treat than Nora, so it grabbed her by the shoulders and snapped its head down, mouth gaping, onto her own head. She was grimacing, hoping to hell that this wasn't some trick… and as her head entered the reeking maw of the monster, she felt what could best be described as a mild tickle encase her neck, as it sank its teeth in and did its damnedest to bite her head off. Frustrated, it pulled her out of its mouth, lifted her bodily up, and began slamming her into the ground, over and over again. Apart from the motion-sickness induced nausea, her body experienced zero ill effects.

She began to idly wonder how long the onslaught would continue when she felt another weird tingling sensation as the grip on her shoulders vanished. Looking around from her spot on the ground, the deathclaws had all vanished. Piper turned and saw Nora at the computer terminal, giving her a smile and a thumbs up. Piper tentatively returned the thumbs up, but was still feeling too out of sorts to manage a proper smile.

XXXXXXXXXX

Nora and Piper's conversation at the start is lifted and lightly modified from one of Piper's friendship conversations — one of the first ones you can get with her, I think, but I'm not sure at the moment.

Nora namedrops another perk, Strong Back, which (in F4) adds to your carry weight and lets you fast travel while encumbered (or not receive damage from encumbrance in Survival mode).

Whenever I see someone refer to DC in a Fallout context, it takes me a moment to parse which one, haha.

Radiation storms are spooky, but are for all intents and purposes harmless (and ultimately boring). So, since this is my story, why not make them more lethal the closer you are to the Glowing Sea? (I'm sure there's a mod that boosts their lethality too, haha).

It's just funny that a character as oversexed as Nora misses such an obvious invitation.

I really like how F4 lets you swap out weapon parts to better (legendary) weapons. I was pissed the first time I tried doing that in Starfield and the part I was trying to swap out just vanished into thin air. (I do enjoy that game, but I also acknowledge that it's got many flaws, haha).

So yeah, Creation Club stuff is canon to this story, hahahaha. (I mean, I'm not really going to bother incorporating the CCs that I don't own since I can't personally experience them and thus figure out how best to fit them into the story, but you can just assume that, like, there's a suit of Captain Cosmos power armor gathering dust out there in the Commonwealth, for example). Bethesda itself is a bit wishy-washy on how canon CC is to the series, with Emil Pagliarulo calling it "parallel to canon", but that's such a weenie way to put it. MAKE IT CANON, COWARDS!

With CC being canon, though, comes a lot of questions. How DOES Nora know how to build something like this? How is Piper magically sucked into the simulation? This is extremely Weird Shit, and it's going to be fun as hell to explore it!

(VR Workshops is probably my personal favorite CC of all the stuff available for Fallout 4, and it's especially useful for a character in Survival difficulty. For one, you can spawn a shitload of radroaches, slaughter them all effortlessly, and get your Adrenaline bonus maxed out instantly. For another, since settlement objects can be placed for free in the VR environments, you can plop down beds, radiation sprayers, storage containers (you can store items IN the VR environment, how's THAT for weird). VR worlds are persistent from pod to pod globally, so you can build one pod in Sanctuary, one in Starlight Drive-In, one in Greygarden, etc. and you can use the aforementioned ability to kind of do an end-run around Survival's stricter encumbrance rules, haha. Oh, and I think one or two of the enemies you can spawn in glitch out and accidentally give XP, so if you're mad about exploits you can just keep spawning in those enemies for infinite free experience (since you literally can't die in VR). And of course I already talked about water towers a few chapters ago. It's just overall fun and great.)

I'm thinking of changing the story's summary. Good idea?