Ellen Park, the Lone Wanderer

Voodoo, for his part, is in most of his usual kit, sans NVGs. A pair of sunglasses blocks out the sun's glare, a rifle is slung over his pack, and his machine gun's in his hands. He's gone light on the body armor today - it's just recon, and the terrain would be a bitch otherwise.

He nods at Ellen's comment, looking over the landscape for signs of movement as he moves away from the door.

"We'll make it work."

He racks back the M60's bolt, producing a satisfying cha-CHIK as the weapon chambers a round.

"How long's it been since the ambush?"

Edited Date: 2013-02-23 08:45 pm (UTC)

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"About a day. I brought the scent goggles," Ellen says, holding up the eyewear Voodoo no doubt remembers from their trip to the Pitt. "And better orders than last time. Senior Paladin Tristan knows what he's doing- he says if I have to travel more than a day and a half to find where these people came from, I'm to turn around and come back to the Citadel, because anybody that well armed who's based that far outside the Capital proper is more of a problem than one recon mission is going to fix."

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Voodoo nods. "I'm on point. Just point us in the right direction."

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"This way," Ellen says, and pulls the goggles on. "There were twelve of them originally. You don't normally see raiding bands that large. Split Jack had the last gang that organized and we broke his operation more than a year ago. He might have tried to get back into the action, but this didn't feel like his style- he was planning on making the operation too expensive for Rivet City to bother with and then taking over himself. This was just an all-out attack."

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Voodoo thinks on this for a bit.

"Could be it's just some new kids on the block. Coupla mopes get lucky, find a weapons cache, decide it's time to put 'em to use. Could be goin' after your water caravans for the profit - kill the guards, raid it, sell off the water at twice the going rate. 's what I'd do if I was lookin' to solidify control over this place. 'ventually you'd bankrupt people, then you'd get to hold the water hostage."

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Ellen nods. "I'm really hoping whoever they are, they just got lucky and hit an old cache," she says. "Lucky Harith hasn't been seen anywhere along his route in more than a week. If they took out the biggest traveling weapons dealer in the Wasteland, a lot of people are going to be pretty hard up for self defense once their ammo runs out, and they won't have much choice except to put up with whatever people like this shove down their throats."

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"In over a week? No shit?"

He shakes his head, his eyes never leaving his sector.

"Well, I hate to say it, but the odds ain't lookin' good for him. Dollars to dinar's that's where they got their guns. They could just have him as a hostage, though, 'specially if he's any kinda gunsmith."

Edited Date: 2013-02-23 09:55 pm (UTC)

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"I sincerely hope so. He's better at weapon repair and maintenance than anybody outside the Citadel except maybe Crazy Wolfgang," Ellen says. "He's even got Flak and Shrapnel beat... hopefully that'll be enough to have kept him alive."

She grimaces, and indicates the burnt-out wreck of a pre-War pickup truck ahead.

"The ambush happened on the other side of that truck there. There's a gully you can't really see until you're right on top of it- they kind of burst out of it one after another."

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aeons_crackshot

"Good cover too, so long as you don't mind the possibility of a stray shot making your cover explode."

"If they're smart enough to stage stuff like this, they may be smart enough to realize he's worth more dead than alive," Annabelle agrees.

"Might be a good idea to circle around the ambush site, they may have gotten careless when they started dragging off the loot."

Footprints, drag marks, blood...all kinds of things can easily be left behind by the careless.

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Voodoo grunts a noncommittal grunt as he walks around the wreck, watching every step. "No signs of explosives. These guys might've been smart, but they weren't trained."

He steps down into the gully and walks along it, looking along the bottom. A brass shell casing glints in the sunlight, and he bends to pick it up, rotating it in his fingers before holding it up for the others to see.

"Five-five-six," he says. "Looks clean, too. Almost new. These guys were squared-away with their ammunition."

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"They probably got Harith, then," Ellen says with a resigned sigh. "Which means we'd better pick this up quickly. I always did like Harith."

The troll-made goggles look more than a little ridiculous, especially given that she's dressed in the Chinese stealth suit with the headpiece pulled down, but Ellen doesn't particularly care. When you own an object that allows you to see scent information, its looks are entirely secondary.

"They spent a pretty long time here, if the level of smell concentration is anything to go by," she says after a bit. "I wonder how many minor traders they might've gone after before they got bold enough to hit the water caravan... the more concentrated end of the scent trail is out the southern end of the gully, so I'm guessing that's the way they came in. They scattered when we started getting the upper hand."

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aeons_crackshot

Annabelle has been looking too. She nods in agreement at what Ellen's picked up via sent. "Brush suggests people were standing there a while, not much in the way of prints, though. Ground's too dry."

She moves on, circling from the northern end of the gully. "Found a couple of couple of shell casings and some blood. Walking wounded, maybe?"

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Voodoo shakes his head. "If the Brotherhood winged one of them, they're either dead or long gone by now. Wildlife'd take care of any stragglers. What do the goggles say, Ellen?"

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Ellen turns and heads over to Annabelle's position, scanning the ground rapidly, then lifting her gaze to a further distance. "There's an erratic trail heading off away from the others," she reports. "Probably the wounded one. It's as old as the rest- whoever they were, they didn't stick around. The others look like they start veering towards the same direction as the southern trails..."

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Andrea's still feeling her way in this group so while everyone's been checking things over, she's been keeping watch; pacing around and trying to parse through the scents left behind. She tries her best to determine how many likely raiders there were and their health though with scents this old she doesn't hold much hope.

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Voodoo thinks on this for a half-second.

"Dude's probably bug food by now. Even if he ain't, he can't help us. I say we follow the main trail and stick to the high ground where we can."

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Ellen nods. "If it were more recent I'd try to track him down and question him, but... this isn't a good place to be wounded." She looks to Andrea. "Have you got anything? The trails I'm seeing overlap each other so much it's hard to make out much other than 'a lot of humans'."

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"This old, the scents are commingled pretty badly," Andrea says musing then she holds here mouth open and breaths in some more. "Still I think I can pick out maybe seven or eight bodies, maybe more. They were nice and didn't bath too often so their scents are pretty unique. I think our wounded guy is another nonbather. Getting a strong chem smell too. Are their any old plants around here?"

Edited Date: 2013-02-24 12:09 am (UTC)

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"Not on the scale of Takoma Industrial or the Nuka-Cola plant," Ellen says, "but there were a few places west of here that used to be garages and vehicle maintenance shops. Those kinds of buildings were pretty ideal for manufacturing chems- I ran into a ghoul once who was using an old Metro station to make a new version of Jet."

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Andrea takes another deep breath and shakes her head.

"You guys have problems with drugs here? Cause this kind of reminds me of some of the street drugs I see manufactured back home. Not exactly but it's closer to it than cleaning chemicals. They also are in pretty good health, or were."

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"That's what Jet is," Ellen says. "It's a stimulant, a nasty one. It's pretty popular with the violent and murdering types, too. Murphy, that ghoul I mentioned, was making an amped-up version using pre-War sugar cereal." She wrinkles her nose. "There's also Psycho, which was meant to make soldiers faster and more dangerous during the Resource Wars. People use that to get high these days. And Buffout is basically oral steroids that tend to induce psychotic berserker rages. It's pretty popular with raider types. Med-X you don't see so much in the field, though. That's synthetic opioid painkiller, so that's more the kind of thing people use back at base. It wouldn't surprise me at all if these guys had been using Jet before we ran across them."

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"Oh this just sounds like oodles of fun," Andrea dead pans. "Let me see this blood."

She walks over and crouches down to pick up some of the blooded dirt and gives it a good smell as well.

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The thing about Buffout is that when you get it down your throat, it tends to induce a number of body reactions that mimic healing, at least temporarily. Mostly in the 'hey, I'm not bleeding any more' vein- so to speak. People who haven't got stimpaks to genuinely induce the healing process will sometimes chorf the stuff down to get away from an unwelcome combat situation even if they're not looking for a good old fashioned 'roid rage.

So, yeah; what do metabolized steroids smell like a day or two after the fact? This, pretty much.

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