It was all going so well at first. They'd met at an old, ruined diner — Nora, Piper, Preston, and a small handful of Minutemen — and coordinated a plan of attack. The plan was on the simple side — everyone just charge in and start shooting anything that moved. (Nora wanted to enact what she called Plan Omega — she ran in and shot everything by herself — to which Piper asked what she wanted written on her grave marker. Nora said that she wanted two graves and two markers — the one over hers would read Unknown, and the one next to hers would read Arch Stanton. Preston then begged (well, he calmly asked, but Nora could tell by the tone of his voice that he was getting antsy) that they stay on topic.
They made their way to the big gaping hole in the wall and started blasting away at the mirelurks mirelurking within the Castle's fortifications. Nora decided that the crustacean bastards were weaksauce who only had any kind of a reputation because they had a big tough shell; she ran right up to each of her targets and unloaded both barrels of her shotgun into their faces, which was typically more than enough to ruin their day. (And whenever that wasn't enough to finish one off, she'd just use some quick footwork to dart away and let Preston, Piper, or one of the other Minutemen finish the job).
The problems started when, once the mirelurk numbers began thinning, some of the Minutemen approached their nests. Nora, being low on her shotgun shells, holstered her shotgun and whipped out Kellogg's big fun gun before going over to observe them. She saw the eggs just sitting there, all peaceful like, and she saw the men pointing their guns at the eggs, and just as they pulled the trigger, her maternal instincts kicked in something fierce. "DON'T HURT THE BABIES!" she bellowed, charging forward. But, alas, it was too late for that nest, as the eggs and the unborn within were splattered. "YOU FUCKING BASTARDS!" She kicked one of the Minutemen in the nuts and pistol whipped the other one.
Preston saw the commotion and jogged up. "General, what the hell is the matter with you?" he demanded.
Nora turned to him, ugly crying. "THEY SHOT THE BABIES AND KILLED THE BABIES AND THEY'RE LUCKY I DIDN'T JUST SEND THEM STRAIGHT TO HELL!" she shrieked.
Piper also ran up, alerted by the commotion (and more used to handling Nora's outbursts by now). "Okay, let's calm down, okay?" she urged. She put a hand on Nora's shoulder. "These aren't innocent babies, Nora. When mirelurk eggs hatch, they're hostile from the very first moment. I remember a year or so back, a trader brought a whole clutch of them into Diamond City…" She shuddered at the memory. "One of them actually got into the water and we couldn't get it for a good three months. It almost killed one of the security team before it was taken down." She scowled. "Personally, I think that little prick Sheng was slipping it food — maybe figured it could be trained or something — but I could never prove it."
"Well, maybe Sheng believed in the power of babies being innocent loves," Nora muttered, not caring how incoherent she sounded.
Piper and Preston exchanged weary, exhausted looks. "Okay, how about this," Piper said. "We won't shoot any unhatched eggs, okay? We'll just walk up to the nests. Doctor Duff, in the SCIENCE! Center, thinks that eggs that are ready to hatch will pop on their own if they detect vibrations from non-mirelurk sounds or movements in their vicinity. So, if the eggs hatch and the newborn mirelurks attack us, they're not innocent babies, right?"
"…I suppose so," Nora agreed, though she was still sulky. She handed Piper the Deliverer. "Could… could you, uh, handle it?" she asked, unable to look Piper in the eye.
Piper reluctantly took the gun. "Yeah, Blue, I'll make it quick and painless," she assured her. She was surprised at how husky her voice sounded. She did empathize with Nora's feelings, even though she understood that they were contradictory with the way life just was nowadays. More importantly, she understood that this was about a lot more than baby mirelurks.
So they went from nest to nest, Nora stomping her feet a few times to rattle the eggs, then sticking out her arms for the baby mirelurks to jump up and latch their tiny little jaws on. Each time, she grimaced at the painful sensations, and soon her arms were coated in bruises and lacerations that seeped blood, but the biting was a fleeting sensation — Nora kept her eyes squeezed closed for the whole process, but she could still hear the quiet cough of the Deliverer's suppressor as it ended the life of the baby mirelurks. After this grim chore was done, she would collect up the unhatched eggs in her bag (which bothered Piper, but she didn't say anything about it), and then… harvested the meat from the dead baby mirelurks (which really bothered Piper, especially after the fuss she'd thrown up about them in the first place).
Nora saw how Piper was looking at her and gave an embarrassed little smile. "What? It's not like they're using their meat anymore," she reasoned.
Piper gave Nora a long, hard look. "You know, Blue, sometimes I think you aren't using your meat anymore either," she confided, tapping Nora's forehead for emphasis.
"I'll use your meat," she purred, giving Piper an instant case of goosebumps. She tried to think of something to distract herself — she didn't want to lose focus in case anything unexpected happened before they finished clearing the Castle.
Piper got her wish in the worst way. Off on the other side of the fortifications, there was the tattoo of gunfire as one of the Minutemen blasted the baby mirelurks streaming from their hatched eggs. "Gotcha, you little bastards!" the soldier cried out. "I think we got 'em all! Stupid fucking mirelurks!"
Nora groaned and ran a hand down her face. "Oh, why oh why did he have to say that?" she questioned.
The scream that echoed out from the water elicited a fear response in the assembled humans that hadn't been triggered since before the invention of fire. The soldier at the far end of the battlements turned to look out over the water; he raised his rifle and began firing it full-auto, screaming at the top of his lungs. It was hard for Nora to tell from this distance, but she was pretty sure he'd filled his drawers. He rapidly burned through his clip of ammo and swapped it out for a new one, but before he had a chance to slam it into place, a great gout of yellow liquid flew from the darkness and engulfed him. His scream of terror turned into one of pain, as he staggered away from the wall and tried to wipe the liquid from his face; to the horror of Nora and the rest, he only managed to succeed in forcibly sloughing off his own skin. As his windpipe dissolved, so his screaming died, and he himself soon followed suit.
To the right of the poor Minuteman, still convulsing in his last agonizing death throes, there was another big, gaping hole in the wall, this one facing out to the sea, and now Nora observed what had made it in the first place. Honestly, Nora was amazed the Commonwealth hadn't been destroyed under its heel yet — after all, its distant cousin Godzilla had had no problems stomping Tokyo flat, up on the silver screen, back in the ancient past. The thing would easily dwarf a house, and it was definitely taller than the wall it was walking towards, and had more legs than anything God had had a hand in creating. A distant part of Nora's brain, the part that wasn't shrieking in terror, recognized that parts of it resembled the mirelurks, and she supposed it made some sense that if they lived long enough they got to be terrors that drove men mad.
For a moment, she even understood how HP Lovecraft felt. (Except for the incredible amounts of racism. He really had to name a cat THAT?).
She heard a voice bellowing: "SEE, YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKERS?! THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T KILL THE BABIES! YOU MADE MOMMY MAD!" It took her a few moments to realize it was her own voice.
The other Minutemen were falling back, pelting it with as much gun and laser fire as they could bring to bear. Piper was tugging at her sleeve to join the retreat, try and fall back, live and come back another day. She absently brushed Piper's hand away and, instead, ran forward. Like hell she'd run away. She was going to kick this thing's ass, and then yell at Preston some about how incredibly vague 'monster' had been, and then yell at Piper about how she was right to warn her against jinxing the mission, and then… and then… well, she wasn't sure her life even had a double-digit count of minutes left in it, so reserved future plan-making for after the battle was over.
She reached the place where the dead Minuteman lay and saw that he'd dropped his gun and the clip for it when he'd gotten splattered with acid, leaving them untouched. She grabbed them up, slapped the clip home, then backed up a few feet to get a running start. She'd seen this in an old movie once, and really, really hoped it worked.
Back where the Minutemen had first breached the Castle, Piper (half crouching behind an old, crumbling wall) saw where Nora was and realized what she intended to do. "BLUE, NO!" she screamed.
Nora looked at her, blew her a kiss, then took a running leap… and landed directly on top of the thing's carapace. Miraculously, she didn't impale herself on any of the semi-spiky protrusions sticking out of it, and in fact was able to use them to brace herself and hang on as the thing lumbered over the pile of smashed bricks and into the fort proper. Holding herself steady with one hand, she used the other to press the rifle almost directly into the thing's big, thick shell, then squeezed the trigger and held it. Bullets flowed from the gun, biting into the thick chitinous exterior, chipping away at it bit by bit until… the gun ran dry. Nora tossed it off the side of the lumbering beast, then drew Kellogg's gun and fired each loaded round into the same spot she'd been targeting, blasting away more and more chunks of its shell.
By now the big fucking thing had cottoned onto the fact that a hostile entity was its hat, and it began whipping itself back and forth, trying to throw Nora off so it could disembowel her with one swipe of its claws. Nora simply tightened her grip, finished off the last of the bullets in Kellogg's gun, reholstered it, then drew out her trusty double barreled shotgun. She gave it both barrels in the same spot, reloaded it (she'd been practicing one-handed reloading of her shotgun for shits and giggles, not realizing the skill might come in handy someday), hit it again, then repeated the process.
Her antics atop the mega-mirelurk had one immediate benefit: it became so distracted that it was no longer attacking or even advancing on the other Minutemen. One of the ones that Nora hadn't bothered to catch the name of raised his own weapon to fire, but Preston stopped him. "No, we can't risk hitting the general!" he said. "What the hell is she doing up there?" he wondered aloud.
Piper overheard the question, but chose not to answer it. Sure, she had a pretty good idea, knowing Nora's penchant for insane, flashy tactics that inevitably worked out better than any sane person could hope for. She only hoped that Nora was packing a strong enough bomb. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed her luck to keep Nora safe, feeling ridiculous as hell as she did so.
Nora swore as she realized she was out of shotgun shells. She angrily replaced her shotgun in its holster, regretted that her energy weapons were packed away deep in her bag, and resorted to the only weapon left to her: she began striking the weakened point on the shell with her fist, repeatedly, as hard as she could. She'd wind back all the way after each impact, then bring it down again, hard. Her hand began throbbing with pain after a few of these punches, growing more and more intense with each slam. After about a dozen or so of these, there was a distinct snapping sound which she was pretty sure was one of the bones in her fingers. Every impact after that gave an additional delightful tearing sensation inside her hand as the bone dug into flesh, but she only redoubled her efforts to punch through the damn thing's hide.
Finally, unexpectedly, the weakened carapace gave way, and Nora found herself arm-deep in mirelurk goo. "YES! FUCKING FINALLY!" she bellowed. She reached into her pocket, and pulled out a thing of beauty: a plasma grenade. She couldn't quite remember where she'd found it (since she rummaged through every last fucking thing in sight at all times), but she was glad she had it. She armed it, slam-dunked it into the goo hole, then threw herself free of the giant creature. She landed hard on her shoulder, and was pretty sure it had been dislocated, but all the pain coursing through her was nothing compared to her need to lock her eyes on the giant fucking thing in its final moments. Her eyes grew wide with anticipation as it whirled around, either to crush her, tear her to pieces, or bathe her in its corrosive liquid…
…and then a bright flash, followed by a tremendous boom, followed by a geyser of guts, emanated from the hole Nora had created. The giant mirelurk gave one final spasm, then toppled over onto its side. The great beast was dead.
"Thank God for Casper Van Dien," Nora muttered, as she staggered to her feet, injecting herself with a stimpak once she was up.
The Minutemen, Preston and Piper among them, rushed forward, cheering and laughing. "The general killed the beast! The general killed the beast!" was the chant on their lips.
Nora casually leaned against the fallen giant, arms crossed nonchalantly (as nonchalantly as one can cross their arms when one of them is dislocated), soaking in their praise until they were tired of giving it. "Hey, Preston, remember our talk about needing the exact details of what a settlement's problem is? In case I wander in with a penknife and there's a platoon of raiders or, let's say, a giant fucking mirelurk? Remember how I emphasized the importance of intel?" Preston wisely moved his hands to cup his nuts, to which Nora laughed. "Oh, Preston, your nuts are safe on this day — mainly because your neck was on the line as well, so you shared in the risk. From now on, I want more info than just 'monster' — I want to know the size of what we're dealing with, what its offensive capabilities are, and, oh yeah, that it exists. Your 'recon' was dogshit and got a man killed, and if this really is going to be our turning point, we have got to do better." Preston gazed at the ground, properly chastised. "Okay, everyone!" Nora clapped her hands, not even wincing at the surge of pain this caused her injured arm. "We got our fucking Castle back!" More cheers. "You guys need to get to work on getting the radio up and running."
"What are you going to do, general?" one of the Minutemen asked.
Nora yawned. "I'm fucking exhausted, and hurtin' for certain, so I'm going to go take a well-earned nap. But first, I'm going to mark my territory." To everyone's shock, she turned around, hiked up her skirt, thrust her hips forward, and began hosing down the giant mirelurk corpse with a torrent of urine. Everyone, save Piper, averted their gaze.
Nora and Piper began heading towards one of the passageways within the Castle's walls. "I'm sure there's a fuckin' bed there we can use," Nora murmured. She realized she was limping, and Piper was helping to support her. She didn't even know when she'd hurt her leg.
Soon enough, navigating the passages led them to an elaborate bedroom that had probably belonged to the general of yesteryear. The bed was a broken ruin, but Nora just spread out a blanket on the frame, took the Minutemen flag down off the wall, and used it as a sheet. She opened her eyes long enough to see Piper was still standing there, uncertain. "You laying down with me, or what?" she inquired.
Piper wasted no time in pulling off her boots, dropping her own pack, and sliding in onto the makeshift bed, cuddling in next to Nora. "I was so afraid for you today," she murmured. "I was afraid I'd lose you."
Nora gave a bleary smile. "Never gonna lose me," she said, sleep taking her. "No matter how hard you try." When she awoke later, she had a vague memory of leaning in to kiss Piper, but couldn't remember if it had actually happened or if she'd dreamt it.
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That Arch Stanton business is a nod to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, which Fallout 2 referenced in the same way.
Need to know more intensifies.