She had bid her adieu to her dearest friends, letting them all go back to their preferred places, before she embarked on a new job, a new experience, a change of pace.
At first, the journey had sounded exhausting and she had silently complained about the long walks, but she found herself liking the long journey and this rather small caravan company—even more so than she did Cass'. Jed's stories amused her that she would often times ask him to tell her more, and she came to feel the need to watch the back of Stella and the rest of the group all the time. She even befriended the brahmins.
Going back to the routine of being Mr. House's right hand had proved to be a mistake. Only recently did she realize that she shouldn't have jumped straight into the job, especially after her stressful encounter with Ulysses in the Divide. She had once thought the Divide would be just another challenging destination, but it turned out to be far worse than Big MT. The constant sight of destruction and devastation she had seen in the Divide threw her off guard many times, not to mention the countless marked men and hostile creatures she must fight alone because ED-E had often been too spooked to be in combat. She could seek refuge in many places in the Big MT, but not there. The radioactive storms there were mostly inescapable.
And even though she had patched things up with vengeful Ulysses whom she hadn't even known or remembered, and stopped him from annihilating the whole Mojave wasteland, she had lost her dearest ED-E. Her arms wrapped tightly around ED-E as soon as she reached Primm, feeling the cold metal against her skin. She didn't care—it felt like the only thing grounding her after the chaos. Sadly they were two completely different robots: despite how wet ED-E became that time, it couldn't sense her sadness nor try to comfort her.
She had also needed to recover from her crippling dependence on psycho and buffout during her time in the Divide. Fixers couldn't solve her bursts of rage, jitters, and agitation. The shakes wouldn't stop for hours, even after she forced herself to sleep. Every muscle in her body screamed for the chems.
She had consumed less Fixers in the end due to the violent vomiting she must endure. It had got increasingly hard for her to take harmless chems like Stimpak, as she had depended on a lot of RadAway and had jabbed herself more than she had done in both Big MT and the Mojave. Dr Usanagi had tried her best but eventually changed her focus on other patients.
Knowing that everything in the Mojave hadn't been fruitful, she had asked for help from Dr. Mobius who had, in his own ways, 'worked' together with the other think tanks to upgrade the sink's AutoDoc. Despite the reluctance to have her organs removed for the second time, she had thought that the other options had been impractical and more painful.
By the time she had regained consciousness, SCIU had told her that she had been comatose for two months. As soon as she had regained her strength and health, she had used her transportalponder to be sent back in the outskirts of Freeside and reported back to Mr. House.
Luckily, her big boss hadn't deployed his monitoring robots to observe every movement after delivering the platinum chip, so it hadn't been necessary to tell him the truth about the Big MT and her months-long disappearance.
Mr. House however had noticed the many surgical scars once again and found that her performance hadn't been as sterling as before the Boomers' mission, though not up to the point where he no longer needed her service. When asked about it, she had told him that he needn't worry about the scars, and that she could still get him what he wanted, given the time. Her boss cared about plan execution and results, and she knew that very well. She had been utilizing that fact to keep him out of her discreet affairs with success.
Many times she had relived the moments when she had been ambushed by the marked men, when they had cornered her, when she had witnessed the wounds spreading on skinless bodies closing on their own and their retaliation only seconds after she had shot them in the head; the times when a pack of tunnelers had snuck and jumped on her, or when ED-E had left when she needed him the most.
Snapping out of her dream had become something she'd got used to. The presidential suite had been a good place for peace and quiet, but after spending much of her time in darkness in the Divide, she had asked Mr House's permission to sleep in the penthouse. Still she'd screamed in her sleep and jolted awake—everybody had heard it all.
"Alix." His voice had echoed through the capacious lounge, mildly startling her as she had sipped vodka at the bar. "To my understanding, you have another residence in Mount Charleston among the mutants?" She had only nodded in response, knowing that he could see her anywhere in his own building anyway.
"Stay there awhile. Bring your loyal companions with you. Clearly whatever you worked on before bothered you significantly." Mr. House had spoken in a less authoritative manner, to which she wondered if that was a form of pity.
To her chagrin, Arcade had been busy with some work from the Followers of the Apocalypse while ED-E was needed in Primm. She hadn't wished to retrieve Rex back from the Big MT, letting him be with his girlfriend and pups. As for Cass, she had got an "Absolutely fucking not, shithead" reply from her, which she had expected—probably because she had written "To dearest Rosy Sharon" on the front side of the letter.
She had then spent most of her days inside, listening to the radio, practising her guitar—it had been a long time since The Lonesome Drifter taught her some chords. She had carefully strummed and sung 'Home on the Wastes,' wishing she could show him what she had learned.
She had gone out of her cabin occasionally to exercise in the open or talk to somebody. Even so, everybody had been mostly busy. Due to his very short breaks in between his patrols, Marcus had always kept conversations brief albeit friendly. There had been only so much to do with Lily and her bighorners, although harvesting them had given her a fresh experience at first. They had chatted every now and then, but decided to leave Doc Henry and Calamity alone with their research and doctoring work.
After finding Jed's radio message during her free time alone in her bungalow, she had jumped to reach Mr. House as fast as she could. To her surprise, he had encouraged her to take part of the expedition, as Zion was "one of the perennial wonders you can find in this country other than Vegas, and such change of scenery could improve your well-being." She had immediately sent a letter to Jed after getting her boss' approval.
"Hey!" Ricky yanked her to the side, knocking her off her thoughts. "Didn't you hear me, dumbass?" He waited until the rest of the caravaneers walked farther and whispered, "For fuck's sake I was signing at you but you ignored me, then I kept calling you and you wouldn't answer—you off your head or something?!"
One of the many things she had learned from her experience was that she shouldn't spend unnecessary energy on anything insignificant.
Pacer was her first self-test. She tried to keep up with him the way The King did, but ultimately decided to kill him through the Van Graff family. As she had approached the scene, she had used a stealth boy and had only stood to watch Pacer melt into a green gunk.
Nowadays, she could keep it together well—after the Divide, these things seemed trivial. She reminded herself that she only put up with him because of the extra caps and a lighter load on her back. "What is it?" She asked nonchalantly, which infuriated the addict.
"I need a hit. Fucking now," he replied quietly. "One of Stella's guys said we're getting nearer to Zion and I will not look like a dipshit. Not if her stories about White Necks are true."
She flung her bag forward and searched for a vial of psycho. There was only one left and she intended to keep it for herself, in case of emergency. "Sorry bud, got only fixers left," she said.
"Don't put that shit on me now. If you're lying, I'm gonna skin you alive right here, right now. Don't you dare fucking lying to me, asshat," he said, fidgeting even more.
"Pal, you've used all your 10 hits. You wanna get 30 hits more, go back and find a fiend, I've got nothing more, only fixers. Which is better than nothing at all, won't you agree?" she said as she showed him four boxes of fixer.
"Fucker, I know you're hiding some. You're just gonna make me fucking spend more caps ain't ya?!" said Ricky as he was searching for his so-called '11mm' SMG with his quivering hand, failing a few times.
She responded with silence, but once she saw that Ricky had held his gun, she swiftly slammed a box of fixer to his face, seized his gun, and pointed her combat knife to his neck.
"You have two options now. The easy one, take this box of fixer—or you can ask me for more, whatever, as long as you pay 80 caps each. The hard one, I slash your neck just to hurt you, then tell both Jed and Stella that you're nothing but a fibber that spits bullshit about your skills and situation. I'm sure we both think that second option's too much of a hassle." She pressed her knife onto his heck, making him breathe with panicked rapidity. "Better take the fixer."
Ricky complied. One of his quaking hands had found its way to the box on his face. When he grabbed the drug, she backed away but not before shoving her open palm to his chest."80 caps."
She got tossed a pocket of jangling caps, which she quickly opened as Ricky swallowed the drug. As she finished counting caps, she heard a sound of his retch. "Right, I forgot to mention the nausea and possible vomiting." She spoke as she handed the pocket back to Ricky. "Sorry about that. Thanks for your business, as always."
With wet, red eyes, Ricky glared and snatched his pocket back before he vomitted the second time. The caravaneers who heard the commotion ran toward them both. She put a thumb up in the air to let them know that everything was fine.