"This is the greatest day of my life," Nora breathed, cradling her new toy in her arms, licking ghoul blood off its blade (to Piper's great disgust). They had been swarmed, alright, as Nora had predicted — by a horde of feral ghouls. "They smell about the same as the nerds did," Nora had confided to Piper. "But at least they're more coherent." There was a moment's reprieve after they'd killed all the ghouls on the first floor, which let Nora get down to her typical loot vacuum routine. She'd made her way behind the counter, and audibly gasped loud enough that Piper thought she'd had her leg bitten by a crawling ghoul. She'd rushed to help Nora, if necessary, but stopped short when she saw Nora raise the butt of her shotgun and proceed to shatter the glass of a display case. She holstered her shotgun, reached past the broken glass, and withdrew…

"Is that an axe?" Piper had asked. "Like, from the Grognak comics?"

"IT'S THE GROGNAK AXE!" Nora confirmed, overly enthusiastic. Her shout elicited fresh new growls from upstairs, and soon they'd found themselves awash in ghoul mayhem once more. Piper took down a few, but soon stopped bothering as Nora was diving into the thick of things with her new axe, screaming like a true barbarian as she lopped off heads, arms, and legs. Within moments, the second ghoul attack had been destroyed, prompting Nora to not only hug her new axe, but make out with it.

"How does, uh, how does it taste?" Piper asked with a grimace, not sure she wanted to know.

"Ghoul blood?" Nora cocked her head, running her tongue more slowly along the flat of the axe, mopping up more of the blood. "It's, uh, tangier than regular blood? Like a mouthful of pennies that somebody added a quarter to." She shrugged. "I'm not sure if that's quite right — I was never that much of a foodie."

"I don't think foodies of your time ever ran around tasting radiation-contaminated blood," Piper observed. "Or coins, for that matter."

"Bah," Nora said, waving a dismissive hand as she finished cleaning the axe blade. "It's alright in a pinch, but I don't think I'd go out of my way to eat ghoul, if their blood is any indication of what the rest of them tastes like."

"Wonders never cease, you have limits," Piper snarked, smirking a little.

Nora blew Piper a raspberry and rested the axe on her shoulder. As she turned away, her eye caught sight of a more-or-less intact comic book. "Ooh, Unstoppables number five," she murmured, slipping the comic into her pack.

"You see any back issues of Grognak?" Piper asked, playing it cool. "I could use them for, uh, research purposes."

Nora arched an eyebrow at Piper's shit explanation and her incredibly obvious actual motivation. "Oh, you want to stare at a buff, barely dressed, axe-wielding warrior?" she asked with a playful tone. She leaned over and murmured into Piper's ear: "I'll keep an eye out." Piper involuntarily shivered.

Second floor had more ghouls and more loot for Nora to sift through. "Ooh, an autographed Silver Shroud photo!" Nora held it up proudly to Piper. "Bet Kent would get a kick out of this!"

Piper frowned while scrutinizing it. "Didn't the actors usually sign these things?"

"Oh fuck the actors," Nora dismissed. She slid into a creaky old office chair and proceeded to break the paltry encryption on the still-functional computer on the desk in front of her. "Ooh, drama," she said after a few moments of reading centuries-old emails. "Seems there was a lot of contention over the Silver Shroud TV show — which I would be more excited about if, you know, it hadn't been permanently cancelled by an apocalyptic war."

"Oh, is that why they have a costume here?" Piper asked.

Nora shook her head. "No, they had an official costume for years — some guy'd wear it and show up to cons, comic book store openings, shit like that. Ditto with the Grognak axe." A nostalgic look crossed her face. "The Shroud guy would come to birthday parties if you paid him fifty bucks," she remarked. "I had him come to my birthday party one year, while Nate was off in Alaska."

Piper put a hand on her hip. "Let me guess, by 'birthday party' you mean 'your bedroom'?"

Nora let out a cackle. "Oh Piper, you know me too well!" she purred. "Unfortunately, the ass wouldn't go through with it — claimed he felt too much like a prostitute in that situation. When I suggested he could return the money and fuck me that way, he just left." She rolled her eyes. "Some people!"

"Yeah, the nerve," Piper said, rolling her eyes — at Nora, to be clear, not with her. She couldn't help a small smile at the older woman's antics, though.

Nora looked back at the screen for more analysis. "Anyway, there's lots of bitching about adding an English butler to the show. My opinion: shut the fuck up, nerds, English butlers are cool."

"Are you just saying that because you have one?" Piper asked.

"…Oh yeah, I do have an English butler!" Nora grinned. "I'd almost forgotten! But no, butlers are cool, English butlers are cooler, and sassy English butlers are the best." She leaned back in the chair, causing it to squeal painfully. "I told Nate after he got home from the war that I wanted a Mr. Handy. I pointed out that we could use the extra help with Shaun, of course, but my main argument was that on TV sitcoms they always had a snooty, wisecracking butler who was part of the family, even though they paid him. Nate got this look on his face — one I've seen on yours many times, Piper Wright! — smiled, and said, 'Sure thing, honey'. And that's how we got Codsworth."

Piper felt a little sorry for Nate, having to deal with his wife's ludicrous nonsense back then. At least that was before she'd started eating people, the lucky bastard. Talking about Nora's robot butler, though, put a different question in her mind. "Did you and Codsworth ever, uh… you know?"

"I know what?" Nora asked, perplexed.

"Well…" Piper wanted to put it delicately. "You know how in old advertisements, they always used to say, 'He's sooo handy!'?"

It took a moment for it to sink in to Nora. "Are you asking… if Codsworth and I ever…?" She mimed the act of copulation with her fingers, and Piper nodded. A supreme look of disgust flew across Nora's face. "Piper, I just told you about how Codsworth is family. I could no more… frolic with him than I could… than I could kiss my father anywhere except on the cheek!" She grimaced at the thought.

"Sorry!" Piper apologized. "It's just… you being you and all…" She trailed off.

"Ah, forget it," Nora dismissed with a wave. "I tend to want to fuck most everything under the sun, so I can understand why you'd think that included Codsworth, too." She got up and the two proceeded up to the next floor. Nora decided to revisit the ancient gossip chat. "There was also some wild bullshit about recasting the Mistress of Mystery, and I definitely would have been pissed about that. I saw that dumb fucking mummy movie the new bitch was in, and I wouldn't have wiped my ass with the script."

"Uh-huh," Piper said, a little disinterested (since they had drawn the attention of a fresh batch of ghouls on the next floor up and they were currently locked in battle with them). "Gotta be honest, Blue, I don't care about 200-year-old gossip."

"Hey, it's only gossip if it's about the living!" Nora objected. "When they're dead, it's history!" She sliced through ghoul after ghoul. "Just think — some of these ghouls we're cutting down might be the very same stupid assholes who were trying to ruin the Silver Shroud!"

"Okay, I'll give you that it's technically history at this point," Piper admitted. "It's just… kind of a niche interest group? I mean, if you hear anything about a Grognak movie, let me know."

"Oh, they did have a Grognak movie, a few years before the war," Nora admitted, blase. "One minor problem, though — you know what I told you about the state of cinema back then?"

Piper grimaced. "He spent the movie killing Communists, didn't he?"

"Oh yeah," Nora said. "Nate and I settled into the theater, popcorn and Nuka Colas in hand, and not five minutes in he fell into a fucking time portal that led to Anchorage and started slicing Chinese soldiers in half left and right. Not a single mention of it in the goddamn trailers. It was a fucking embarrassment, and we couldn't even muster up the strength to laugh at it."

"Yikes," Piper agreed. She grimaced as she rummaged around on one dead feral ghoul's corpse, searching the raggedy remains of its clothing for any loot that Nora would like. (She was becoming more and more adept at quickly looting the dead).

Nora unlocked a door and popped inside, coming back out a few moments later with a holotape. "Score, Silver Shroud script!" she said, loading it into her Pip Boy. "Oh, since I know how much you love centuries-old gossip — excuse me, history — you wanna see me do an imitation of Bing Crosby?"

"The singer?" An uneasy look was on Piper's face. "Yeah, sure, go ahead."

Nora knelt down, grabbing one of the dead ghouls and slamming it to the ground repeatedly. "You are my son!" she screamed. "You are my son and I just love beating the shit out of you!" She just really went to town on that dead ghoul — socking it in the face repeatedly, grabbing it by the legs and slamming it against the walls, just a completely over-the-top performance that concluded when the ghoul's limbs coincidentally, comically, ended up flying off all at once simultaneously.

"God, what the hell was that?" Piper demanded. "He beat his children?"

"And how!" Nora confirmed. "Mr. 'Accentuate the positives' decided his children were negatives, so regularly tried eliminating them." Nora shrugged. "Well, he's in hell now, at least. Good fuckin' riddance."

XXX

"My ears are burning!" Bing Crosby said.

"WE'RE IN HELL, YOU FUCKING IDIOT!" Thomas Jefferson screamed at him. "EVERYTHING IS BURNING!"

XXXXXXXXXX

LOL, suck it, Thomas Jefferson!