"No," the Ghoul told Lucy. "I am not letting you tag along when I go into Bollocks to find Janey and Miz Hunter. Did you not see enough of the Legionaries when we were goin' through Vegas? They're not half-grown boys like the Brotherhood of Steel. They look at everybody who ain't one of them as lesser beings. Especially women. Ghouls too, but they have a healthy respect for those who can handle weapons."

"But I can handle weapons—," she started, then stopped. Dogmeat's ears had suddenly pricked up, and she made a sound that was somewhere between a whine of interest and a growl of warning. She took another step forward, crouching as if after prey or foe, but then she bounded ahead, tongue lolling and tail wagging.

Dogmeat's barked "Wuff" of greeting was met by a sound like a yodeler being strangled in two part harmony. When Cooper and Lucy caught up with Dogmeat, she was frolicking in a clearing with a two headed dog with what was possibly the strangest looking coat ever. He looked short-haired until his necks fused together, but then his fur looked like…a cross between a cloud and a Saint Bernard with maybe some polar bear mixed in. The beagle blood was evident in his barking; the pitbull in the shape of his skulls. The rest was anybody's guess.

"Kirby?" he asked, cautiously.

The two headed dog stopped chasing Dogmeat, and turned to look at him with an expression of surprise, as clear as if he asked aloud, "How do you know my name?"

The dog approached, eyeing him warily with one head while the other kept a lookout.

"Hey, there boy. You know Janey, right? Well, I'm Janey's daddy." He stripped off a glove and held his hand out for the dog to sniff.

Kirby sniffed him like the dog was reading his hand. Afterward, he retreated carefully and sat down by a large tree with a cavity; by the tree were four plastic bowls placed in pairs, two of them half full of clean water, the others with a few meat scraps left in the bottom.

"That's all right. I am a stranger. You wouldn't be much of a guard dog if you trusted me too quick. Good boy."

Dogmeat sniffed the scraps, but did not eat them. She did drink the rest of the water, though.

"So, we know they're here in the area, because one of them is looking after Kirby here. And…" Cooper looked into the tree hole, where there was a bundle wrapped in a tarp. "They left some of their gear here. Yeah, that makes sense. Kirby is too distinctive to keep with them."

"So now what?" Lucy asked, her chin poking out defiantly.

"You wait here with the dogs. Get that bundle out and be ready to go in a hurry. I'm going to the station and see if I can find Janey and Miz Hunter."

"This is ridiculous," she complained. "I thought we had gotten beyond you treating me like I'm a little girl."

"Ridiculous?" he scoffed. "Look, when I get to the station, my priority is gonna be finding the two of them, not watching out to make sure you don't wind up being the troops' entertainment for the night. But if you wanna get intimately acquainted with the whole roster of extras from the cast of Ben-Hur, go right ahead."

She made a face. "If I'm stuck here, that means you're not getting any help from me."

"Whatever shall I do?" he asked her sarcastically.

He cut back to the main road, with Dogmeat at his heels. He tried to order her to stay with Lucy, but the dog insisted on following him.

He passed several legionaries along the way; they gave him the once-over to make sure he wasn't Jael, and let him pass.

Most people didn't remember that there had once been a Roman Empire and a family of Caesars who ruled it, since education was minimal and most people were barely able to do basic math, read and write. The man who called himself Caesar had copied and adapted the military structure of the Roman Army, and was rapidly taking over tribal territories and settlements all over the Wasteland, subjugating the people brutally and turning many of them into slaves. Especially women.

The priority was to make babies to eventually swell the Legion's ranks, but sometimes the legionaries got carried away and subjugated the women to death.

As he reached the Bollocks station (the pre-war town of Pollocks), he looked around. Not many caravanners in sight, and those that were, were mostly older men. Made sense; while Caesar condemned homosexuality on the grounds that it made no babies, in practice, just as in the original Roman Empire, there was probably a lot of it going on in secret.

The person in charge of the water supply was a woman, though—an elderly one, thin as a rail, stooped over by age and no longer prey for the Legion. He asked her if there were any messages for Roosevelt, and got another old envelope.
He backed away so as to have a better view of the camp while he opened it.

'Dear Cooper;

I have told Janey quite a few fairy tales over the past months, and where I first followed the stories as retold in animated features very closely, soon I began deviating from them. In the Little Mermaid, it is the prince who wants to be part of the world under the sea; in Beauty and the Beast, Beauty refuses to marry the prince after he changes, because she fell in love with the Beast, and so on.

But the biggest fairy tale I ever told her was that you must be alive out there and looking for her. I kept the truth from her—that over two hundred years have passed since the War—until now, but she overheard someone talking about it and…well, she had a meltdown such as I have not seen in months.

I told her again that I was sure you were alive, that since she was a ghoul, she must have inherited that from you, and you were also a ghoul. I explained away feral ghouls as people who were old to begin with and were now suffering from dementia, I lied to her until I felt like my face would melt. And she believed me, God help my soul.

That is, if synths have a soul.

So again, I implore you to show up and prove me right after all. Come riding in on a fine looking horse, or drop from a Vertibird in power armor, or anything, however you choose, just show up and unbreak her heart.

Someday, I know, she will no longer believe me. Someday, she will throw this, and many other things, back in my face.

Yours in guilt,
Lana Hunter'.

He folded up the letter, put it back in the envelope and tucked it away with the others.

Then he looked around. Plenty of Imperial tents, one obviously the command tent, two chow lines…

One of the chow lines had the bull sign that marked it as part of Caesar's Army, but the other, much more popular one, was manned by an elderly male ghoul and a ghoul boy about nine or ten years old. The elderly ghoul had a small slate around his neck that read, in chalk, 'Not Feral, Just Mute.' He was dishing some kind of stew into bowls, adding a corn cake on top of each one. The ghoul boy was washing plastic bowls in one tub and rinsing them in another. Propped up against the table was a sign that read, "Stew of the Day: Night Stalker with Silt Beans, Tatoes, and Peppers. Seven Caps in your own bowl. Ten Caps in one of our bowls. Two Caps Refund when you return our bowl."

Wait a moment. Why did he look at that ghoul child and think 'Boy'? Because he was hairless? Yes, that was part of it. But all ghouls lost their hair. Ghoul women and girls wore wigs to cover up their hair loss. Clothes? That was the rest of it. The ghoul child wore just an old pair of overalls, with one broken strap which flopped around, showing half their chest.

That was what initially marked the child as male in his mind. Male nipples on display were normal, natural. Female nipples—once a girl was out of diapers, it was out of sight for the top half of her, even though it might be twelve years or more until anything was going to develop.

He went closer and joined the chow line, studying the two ghouls. The boy wasn't looking at him, but hopping up and down to take back bowls and refund caps.

The elderly man… He had a face like distressed leather, as many ghouls did, and milky white cataracts in both eyes. But looking at his nose…it was missing, and it looked 100% genuine, but when he looked closer, wasn't that nose a bit odd? Bigger than normal. Almost like it was made to conceal a human nose and still look like a ghoul.

And distressed leather? Jael, Lana's studio name, was an extremely skilled leatherworker. Who was tall. Who had an interest in making Wasteland food more palatable. And if she had a voice which was too female to pass—why speak at all, when she could pretend to be mute?

He inched along in the line, searching out ten caps for his bowl of stew. As he came closer, he leaned over and called to the 'boy' ghoul. "Hey. Hey there, pardner. By chance, might you be a cowpoke, too?"

The ghoul child kicked over a tub of washwater as 'he' spun around on his low stool. "Uh….Da, da—dat's right, Mister. I surely am a cowpoke. My name's…. Jimmy."

For the first time in two hundred twenty years, Cooper Howard looked into his daughter's face. Yes, it was her. Her voice, her eyes which were filling up with tears. Her smile…

In case you were wondering, feel free to comment, like and save this story.