"You said you've got bathtubs up here?" Piper asked, breathing hard under her load. She and Nora were hauling as much scrap as they could carry from the Corvega plant, which A. Was generating a lot of sweat, and B. Was strewn with many rotting corpses, the miasma seemingly clinging to the two women like a spiderweb.

"Yep!" Nora confirmed, also breathing hard. "It's easy to filter the radiation out of the water without having to worry about making it potable, at least, so there's plenty to bathe with. Sturges said he'd look into installing a heating coil or something, but it's low down on his list of priorities. Which is fair enough," she acknowledged. "Getting stuff spruced up around Sanctuary is like that old joke about the one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest."

They passed the ruins of a Red Rocket station, having just recently left Concord. Nora had pointed out the various raider corpses, but she hadn't needed to point out the deceased deathclaw. Its carcass was peppered with more bullet holes than Piper cared to count, not to mention one side of its body was simply covered with nasty, extensive burns — and given the only apparent explosion nearby had come from the charred husk of an old car down the road, the burns by themselves hadn't been lethal. The body was definitely older than a few days, but Piper refused to chalk it up as anything other than the most circumstantial evidence that Nora's insane story was true.

Finally, they crossed the bridge (Piper began to sweat even more — crossing rickety old bridges always made her do that) and they were in Sanctuary Hills proper. "Finally!" Piper called out in relief. "Can we just dump this shit at this house here?" She pointed to the first house on the right.

"Afraid not," Nora said, giving Piper a sympathetic grimace. "No, I want all the shit dumped at a central location, just in case we need it anywhere in the neighborhood. Settlement, whatever." She shook her head. "It's hard to get used to calling it 'a settlement' when it was just my neighborhood, you know?" Piper nodded, trying not to let her breathing degenerate into outright wheezing.

A few short minutes later, and Nora and Piper were both groaning in relief as they dropped their heavy loads, Nora's in a backpack and Piper's in an old sack from Corvega that she'd had to carry around like Santa. "Remind me to get you a proper backpack," Nora said. "If we're going to be going on more looting expeditions together, you'll definitely need one."

"Thanks?" Piper said. It was a small yet touching gesture, even with the assumption that Piper would continue to function as a pack brahmin. She proceeded to close her eyes as she reached for the sky, bent over, and did various other poses to start the process of soothing her aching muscles and bones. This process abruptly ended when a hand fell on her shoulder. "HOJEEZ!" Piper said, whirling around in fear as she reached for her pistol. She stopped her draw, though, when she saw it was Mama Murphy, the old stoner seer herself. "Mama Murphy!" Piper cried in joy, embracing the old woman. "It's good to see you're still with us!"

"It's good to see you too, kid," the old woman said with her tired voice, reaching up to caress Piper's face. "I had a feelin' you'd be showing up here sooner or later."

Piper cocked an eyebrow upward. "Been into the jet again, Mama? Or did you find some psycho this time?"

Mama Murphy smiled, her tissue-thin skin making her whole face crinkle. "I don't got the sight no more, kid. No more chems. I made a promise to a lady." She moved her hand from Piper, gesturing to Nora. Piper watched as Nora did her best to ignore the conversation, stacking up a pile of scrap metal from her backpack next to the workbench, but Nora couldn't stop the blush, nor could the dirt and grime flecked over her skin.

Piper turned back to Mama Murphy, similarly unable to hide her own joy. "That's great! That's fantastic! I always knew you could kick the habit!" She leaned in close and lowered her voice. "So, uh, this business about Nora killing a bunch of raiders and a deathclaw…?"

Mama Murphy smiled and nodded. "All true, kid. I Saw it, before I gave up the sight. The others, though, they witnessed it with their own two eyes. They can tell you better."

Piper nodded and gave Mama Murphy one last warm hug. She turned around to congratulate Nora on helping out the old woman when her breath caught her throat. She walked past Nora, past the red workbench, to the back wall of the workspace. She reached out one hand and ran her fingers over the cool, rust-pitted surface of the power armor. She'd never seen a suit of it, not in person, but it was unmistakably what it was, based off of descriptions she'd read and second-hand and third-hand accounts she'd heard. Her hands moved down farther, where they reached several narrow furrows in the metal where the rust had been scraped away, revealing dull gray metal beneath. The pattern was consistent with a deathclaw's signature body part.

"Pretty cool, huh?" Nora said, having walked up beside her. "This bad boy was just standing atop the museum in Concord for centuries, until I came along." She patted the minigun resting on a bench near the power armor. "This baby, too. A weird military helicopter thing crash landed onto it, probably when the bombs fell." She chuckled. "It'll take me a while before I can haul that thing around again, though — used up almost all the ammo for it on the deathclaw. BRRRRRAAAAAAAAP!" She mimed sweeping the minigun back and forth, grinning at all the imaginary bad guys she was eviscerating.

Piper nodded. "Okay, incredible as it sounded, I'm starting to come around to believing your cockamamie story," she said. "Just a little bit!"

Nora gave Piper another smile. "Thank you for your generous change of opinion," she said, giving a little bow.

Another person walked over to them, and Piper recognized him as Preston Garvey, one of the few surviving Minutemen, who'd apparently turned control of his rump organization to the greenest, newest resident of the wasteland who wasn't a newborn baby. "General," Preston said, giving Nora a stiff salute. "We got a message this morning from a runner. Another settlement needs our help."

"Cool beans!" Nora said, awkwardly returning the salute and just absolutely shitting all over the idea of military decorum. "Where's this one located at?"

"Tenpines Bluff," Preston said, handing a note to Nora with the details. "A small farm a handful of miles to the east of here."

Nora read the note, then inputted the coordinates into her Pip-Boy's map. "Neat!" Nora said. "You don't have to come with me for this one, Preston." She gestured towards Piper with her thumb. "Piper's gonna be watching my back for the time being."

Preston met Piper's gaze and gave her a polite nod. "Miss Wright," he acknowledged before turning back to Nora. "The radio beacon has succeeded in attracting new settlers here, general," he continued. "I've already assigned some of them to guarding the perimeter, and some of them to managing our crops. You can consult with Sturges if you have any issues with the duties as they're being handled."

Nora gave Garvey a thumbs up. "Thanks, buddy!"

Piper looked from Preston to Nora and back several times, before cluing in on why Nora seemed so awkward with him. "Ohhhh," she uttered under her breath.

Preston offered another salute. "I'll be returning to perimeter defense duty, general. Good luck out there." He turned and walked off down the street.

Piper waited until he was a fair distance away before leaning close to Nora. "So, when did you sleep with him?"

"What?!" Nora said, her voice high pitched in shock and surprise. "Is it really that obvious?" She nervously ran her fingers through her hair. "I mean, uh… well… after Corvega?" she said. "We'd been getting along well after Concord, and we buddied up on little excursions here and there in the northeast. We had some, uh, intense personal conversations, and… and one thing led to another…" Nora began blushing. "I mean, he's a great guy! Any person would be lucky to be with him! But… he just isn't what I'm looking for in a partner, you know? He's just… a bit of a stiff." Piper nodded. "I mean, I won't lie to him, but I also won't turn down casual sex — Nate and I had… an arrangement…" Nora bit her lip, skin blushing even more from excitement. "Even before the war, we had a pretty frisky…" She shook her head. "But what am I saying, really? You don't want to hear about any of that."

Piper licked her lips and was blushing a little herself. "Oh! Uh, no, it's no problem. You can lay m— lay it on me! Yeah, lay it ON me!"

Nora shook her head, and Piper's little slip sailed over it. "No, no, really. It's all in the past. The extremely distant past. All those men and women are probably long dead by now, and probably double so for everyone Nate encountered."

This is the point where, if Piper was a cartoon character, hearing that Nora was interested in women would have sent her screaming "AWOOOGAH! AWOOOGAH!" like an old car horn, followed by an exaggerated panting session where her tongue fell out of her mouth and rolled out along the ground like a red carpet, followed by her grabbing a giant tub of ice water from directly offscreen and dumping it directly onto herself, converting the ice and the water directly to steam. Instead, she again licked her lips and said, "Oh, I understand. Could you, uh, tell me where the bathtubs are?" Her voice squeaked on the last syllable. Cartoon character or not, she needed to let off some steam.

XXXXXXXXXX

Well, it's now December, and I cleared Nano successfully! (YOLT is nowhere near finished, however, hahaha). That means I have, oh somewhere north of 90,000 words of this just sitting around on my computer, waiting for me to comb through each chapter and make sure it's up to snuff.

According to Ray Lederer, Piper's character designer, she was given her green scarf by Mama Murphy (though it never actually gets brought up in the game). I thought it was an interesting idea to have them know one another, even though I didn't mention the scarf, haha.

The Sole Survivor apparently has no problem romancing every possible partner in the game simultaneously, male or female, so it makes sense for both Nora and the late, lamented Nate to be pansexual and already comfortable with the idea of an open relationship. (The residents of the wasteland seemingly have no problem with same sex relationships or multiple partners, or at least the ones the Sole Survivor can romance don't seem to either. Probably can be chalked up to cultural norms like monogamy and heterosexuality being incinerated along with everything else).