"It must be a damn nice tea-pot."
Chapter Content Rated: R, violence and death.
Traveling the waste on foot was Diane's preferred method of travel, only due to having armor enhanced with stealth technology. As an invisible wanderer of the Appalachians, she had been a silent witness to monstrosities, stunning cowardice, and moments of heroism. Heros were rarely rewarded, and cowards lived to see another day. The past two years since leaving Vault 76 was a jarring slap to the face. This was not the America she was supposed to be rebuilding, yet here she was: in a world of Super Mutants and Scorched. Approaching the disrupted Bot Stop, she found a spot and sat to wait. It was better to wait and observe before blindly approaching what could be an ambush. Aside from a mole rat sniffing about and trash blowing in the wind, the area was peaceful. When she finally crept upon the damaged Bot Stop, she found the main terminal forcefully broken open and ravaged.
"Why? Just, why?" she muttered, keeping her tone low to avoid attracting unwanted attention. It was bad enough that such work was only safe in the daytime; sauntering electronics in the field at night was worse than waving around a powerful flashlight in the dark.
To her, it looked like someone had ravaged the contents of the electronic housing at the Bot Stop without any particular purpose beyond aimless rifling somewhere they didn't belong. "I swear if was a Settler high on chems," she groused. The cabin lock was busted, various wires were pulled, and a few fuses were stolen, but nothing too critical was damaged. This would be a fairly standard repair assignment if all went well. Electronic repair was only one of her skills that made her of special interest to MODUS.
Kneeling, she unsling her backpack and placed it on the floor then collected a few tools from the bag.
"I'm starting repairs." She'd mutter softly, mostly for the ever-present eavesdropping MODUS connected through her Pip. In the typical manner of their arrangement and her need for stealth, the AI did not reply, but she knew he observed all the same. It was a small comfort to not be fully alone in the wastelands.
Skilled hands, and proper tools typically make quick work of the work. But the wires pulled needed to be sorted and inspected before connections could be reestablished. The reality was she needed to first clean up the mess before repairs could begin. Every electronic card would need to be reseated, and connection points would need to be checked. Arching electricity in the damaged electronics would fry the station beyond what she could quickly repair. It would also be challenging to source the replacement parts needed to rebuild a whole station, such as a Bot Stop.
She was moments shy of finishing the repairs to reestablish the uplink when distant gunshots distracted her from the final steps. "Please, please, please," she pleaded under her breath and quickly snapped her attention back to the repairs. It sounded like a gunfight, with several combatants using various caliber weapons. Flush of urgency she tried to work faster, the distant sound of combat continued to build as the battle grew in intensity. There was no telling just yet as to which factions were involved in the fray; for all she knew, it could be some drunk Salvagers squabbling over a neat-looking teapot found in a trash heap. No doubt the Kovac-Muldoon Platform could put eyes and intel onto the fray; however, with the uplink and triangulation down in the area, there was no effective means to pinpoint its destructive power. Wires were sorted, parts arranged, and cards reseated as she knelt low before the terminal. All the while, the fray crept ever closer as the firefight continued. She had gotten good at making guesswork of the size of the fight and how many were potentially involved. In this matter, she guessed six or so.
The sudden death of a distant combatant was made clear even to her from the fever of his screaming and then silence over the pitch of battle. "It must be a damn nice tea-pot," a bit of dark humor to try and calm her nerves.
Plink, a bullet hit a metal wall at the bot spot harmlessly. The fight was closer than she thought. There would not be time to repair the broken lock. Within the six metal cylinders at the Bot Stop was her only backup source if things went wrong, and their command and activation would take MODUS several moments to hijack. Without MODUS intervention, the robots within were little more than for house cleaning and simply errands. "Live, it's going live. There are potential hostiles nearby; I can try and get out, but.." plink, plink, the lethal brawl was making its way ever closer. She could do this.
After a final check, the last of the cables were hastely plugged in. The system lights should have flickered to life, but nothing happened. The shouting and yelling were now close enough to be somewhat understood. She swore everything had been repaired to the standard, so she began frantically double-checking her work. Had she gotten sloppy in her urgency? No. She had worked under fire many times before. Then what was wrong? Why didn't it come back online?
The battle shifted in fever, more screaming followed by sudden silence, another dead.
What was it? What was wrong? Angry and wanting to clear out before the combat could spill into her area, she did the only logical thing. She pulled back a hand and slapped the side of the terminal hard. Just like that, lights flickered on, and the terminal was live. She froze in place for a moment, holding her breath as she waited for the final confirmation that the repair was successful.
"Ah. There we are. Allow us." MODUS finally spoke through the Pip-Bot, confirming the uplink was live, his casual indifference to the nearby battle a minor comfort. At that moment, she could hear someone running on foot in the dry dirt just past the boundaries of the bot stop. The sound of the trespasser was quickly drowned out as the metal cylinders whirled to life; MODUS overrode the onboard system and began to have the awaiting robots weaponized to better suit his tastes for one of his many 'patrols.'
"Custom order received. Priority Schematic List CB-zero-zero-two engaged. And thanks for using B-B-BOT STOP." The terminal proclaimed, too loudly for her tastes.
Still kneeling before the terminal, her repair tools and backpack were forgotten. Someone was nearby. She hoped her low profile behind the Bot Stop walls meant she was undetected and that the individual had kept running. With the sound of the machinery online, she could not even hear the nearby firefight. Quickly, the Enclave issued .10 mm was removed from its holster upon her thigh, and the safety flipped off as she hit a button on her armor to activate her stealth. Her backpack and tools were left on the ground, a potential distraction to exploit since there was no time to pack everything up and flee. Some of those tools in the bag had deeply personal sentimental value to her, having been handed down from her parents some years ago.
Slowly, she began the calculated creep away from her backpack using it as bait, until she was pressed alongside a wall where she could observe multiple entry points up onto the Bot Stop. Plink, plink, she could feel the vibrations of bullets hitting the metal surrounding with greater force while kneeling against the wall. It was during moments like this that she had to remind herself to blink as she held a silent vigil. The sounds of the fighting were closer now. Anything but the Brotherhood, just let it be anything but the Brotherhood - she didn't have a particular faith, but it was well within her right to beg the powers that be all the same.
A blast of heat and the sound of an explosion meant that one of the old, rusted, atomic-powered cars had taken too many hits and finally blew. She hoped it killed a few of the brawlers in the process. Perhaps, that was...it? After the explosion, there was a pause in the sounds of fighting, which was why she did not know. Within the metal Bot Stop cylinders were various new sounds, signaling finalizing progress on the hijacking of the units by MODUS.
"Here, piggy, piggy," the masculine voice growled just out of sight followed by the hard clock of a shotgun muzzle reload. Whoever they were, they were close and not alone. Her stealth was not flawless, and someone with keen eyes or even just blind luck could stumble upon her. Death was the only certainty on the surface. The mechanical sounds stopped, and for a moment, there was little more than a soft electric hum and the sounds of breathing and footsteps on the other side of the wall. If she were lucky, it would only be two of them, but they had at least one shotgun, which favored close-quarters combat. The odds were in their favor, for now. As the first of them stepped up onto the Bot Stop platform, metal cylinders that housed the hijacked bots swiftly slid open - a fiery burst of red illuminated the Bot Stop as the Assultrons turned their weapons upon the trespassers. There was agonized screaming paired with a rapid burst of a shotgun belching hot lead, followed by the firing of a semi-automatic rifle. This was not her fight, and wisely she remained crouched through the firefight until...
Silence? Not trusting the silence, she waited until the sound of choked couching and wet gurgling stirred her curiosity. Nervously, she tightened her grip on the pistol and carefully moved to rise from where she knelt. Still invisible, she did a nervous hand check in the open space before peaking to leer out at what she hoped was carnage inflicted by MODUS in a decisive victory.
Laying on the ground beyond the Bot Stop surround lay three men, two clearly dead and the final struggling to drag his broken body away from a casually advancing Assultatron painted in Enclave black. Sputtering as he lay bleeding out in the dirt, a cascade of crimson choked his final words from him as hate-filled eyes locked onto the robot for but a moment. With effortless grace and ease, the MODUS-controlled Assultron lifted a leg and brought a foot down upon the man's head with calculated precision. The effect was akin to a coconut being put under a hydraulic press, gore and bone splashing outward as his head was obliterated in a quick, decisive moment.
Inhaling sharply, she looked away from the carnage and fought back an upwelling of mixed feelings. "I...will never get used to it, death, that is," she said softly. Diane was the daughter of some of the greatest librarians of the time, and she was classified as a master archiver. War was never her calling. The spoken words caused her stealth to deactivate momentarily, returning her to visibility.
"Member, we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you." A different combat Assultron puppet by MODUS addressed her from behind.
"Your transformative assistance in this affair is appreciated." The dialog continued from another nearby Mr. Handy as the assembly of robots began to fall in for what was a rather typical patrol formation for such an assortment under MODUS' control.
"We feel it is time for you to return to the safety of the bunker. We will handle matters from here." The Assultron, with the leg painted in blood and gore, addressed her last. One conscious, so many forms.
Swallowing hard, she nodded her somber acknowledgment before collecting her kit into her backpack and dropping back into a state of invisibility to begin the return walk back to the Whitesprings Bunker. MODUS needed to recruit fresh members, and soon, she could only chance death so many times.