The Citadel
Mar. 20th, 2014 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aaaaaaaagh_skyAs many times as Ellen's brought people from Milliways into her world for help with her missions, she's never really felt entirely right about how things inevitably finish up. They're friends of hers, or they're volunteers, but they've still done her an enormous favor and risked their lives to lend a hand; that deserves rewarding. The laborer is worthy of his hire. But when she's sent on a mission by the Brotherhood of Steel, she can't get them the repayment they deserve. Bottlecaps don't translate well into anybody's currency other than the NCR's, so she has to repay people in bullets and stimpaks if she's to repay them at all- and a lot of the people who come to help her don't need either of those.
What's worse is that she can't get them recognition for what they've done. Star Paladin Cross knows about Milliways. Unofficially, High Elder Lyons knows. Nobody else. The rest of the Brotherhood can't be told about the place. Most of the Brotherhood is all right with the Lyons Doctrine requiring 'assistance and protection of Wasteland communities' to take equal footing with 'locating and recovering pre-War technology and survival resources', but if word of a place with nearly unlimited resources were to get around... well, Elder Lyons might come out of it okay. It's not like the Brotherhood has any kind of claim on the Bar; you can't take back what your world never had to begin with. But even if he could pull out of it politically, there'd still be the question of 'why are we grubbing in the dirt and making backbreaking deals with scavenger-farmers when we could tap this place for all it's worth' to handle.
Then it would come down to getting the Bar door open, which... doesn't work when other people are around. Ellen's tried. God knows, she's tried. But she can't get there when someone of her world is watching, or even just in the vicinity. Sometimes it doesn't even work when the other person doesn't know she's there or where she's gone. Trying to open the door on command and failing to do so would probably just result in accusations of insubordination rather than insanity. She's got enough evidence of extraordinary resources. They'd just assume she wasn't opening the door because she didn't want to, rather than because it couldn't cooperate or because it didn't actually exist.
So that's how it stands: the only person who knows officially is Star Paladin Cross, and the only one who knows unofficially is Elder Lyons. Everyone else just knows that she gets help, lots and lots of help, from somewhere. The rumor she's heard most often is that she's found an underground civilization of mole people or something, and they won't leave the Metro tunnels or the western Wasteland caves for anyone but her. On very rare occasion people remember that she's traveled outside the Wasteland more than once, or that she was part of getting the people on board the starship in orbit thawed out, and assume that she's getting her help from outsiders in general. Either way, it's all the same. 101 gets a mission, leaves on a mission, finds help, and comes back alone but with the mission accomplished. If the mole people really wanted a reward for their aid, they'd come out of their tunnels and visit the Citadel.
It's driving her buggy, but there's not much she can do about it. And unfortunately, today looks like it's going to be more of the same. She's sent Invincible and X and Katya and Voodoo and D0G back to the Bar. Nobody wanted the Gatling laser, even if it was quite possibly the most impressive heavy photonic weapon she'd ever seen, so she's tucked it into her sylladex; she's got plans for it. They won't mind if she doesn't turn one weapon over to her superiors, especially when she tells them what her plans are. That has to wait, though. She's got to give her report to Senior Paladin Tristan, and then to Senior Scribe Peabody- and then her unofficial report to Jerald. She got this mission in the first place because the Scribes needed to know if someone had found viable Enclave Deathclaw-control technology before they could spare somebody to come to Megaton and get her and Jerald officially married. He deserves to know how things went before almost anybody else.
It's weird, though. There's a heck of a lot more Scribes in the corridors of B ring today than she would've expected. Something's got ... sheesh, it looks like nearly the entire Order of the Quill is stirred up today. Getting through them all to find Tristan's going to be rough.
What's worse is that she can't get them recognition for what they've done. Star Paladin Cross knows about Milliways. Unofficially, High Elder Lyons knows. Nobody else. The rest of the Brotherhood can't be told about the place. Most of the Brotherhood is all right with the Lyons Doctrine requiring 'assistance and protection of Wasteland communities' to take equal footing with 'locating and recovering pre-War technology and survival resources', but if word of a place with nearly unlimited resources were to get around... well, Elder Lyons might come out of it okay. It's not like the Brotherhood has any kind of claim on the Bar; you can't take back what your world never had to begin with. But even if he could pull out of it politically, there'd still be the question of 'why are we grubbing in the dirt and making backbreaking deals with scavenger-farmers when we could tap this place for all it's worth' to handle.
Then it would come down to getting the Bar door open, which... doesn't work when other people are around. Ellen's tried. God knows, she's tried. But she can't get there when someone of her world is watching, or even just in the vicinity. Sometimes it doesn't even work when the other person doesn't know she's there or where she's gone. Trying to open the door on command and failing to do so would probably just result in accusations of insubordination rather than insanity. She's got enough evidence of extraordinary resources. They'd just assume she wasn't opening the door because she didn't want to, rather than because it couldn't cooperate or because it didn't actually exist.
So that's how it stands: the only person who knows officially is Star Paladin Cross, and the only one who knows unofficially is Elder Lyons. Everyone else just knows that she gets help, lots and lots of help, from somewhere. The rumor she's heard most often is that she's found an underground civilization of mole people or something, and they won't leave the Metro tunnels or the western Wasteland caves for anyone but her. On very rare occasion people remember that she's traveled outside the Wasteland more than once, or that she was part of getting the people on board the starship in orbit thawed out, and assume that she's getting her help from outsiders in general. Either way, it's all the same. 101 gets a mission, leaves on a mission, finds help, and comes back alone but with the mission accomplished. If the mole people really wanted a reward for their aid, they'd come out of their tunnels and visit the Citadel.
It's driving her buggy, but there's not much she can do about it. And unfortunately, today looks like it's going to be more of the same. She's sent Invincible and X and Katya and Voodoo and D0G back to the Bar. Nobody wanted the Gatling laser, even if it was quite possibly the most impressive heavy photonic weapon she'd ever seen, so she's tucked it into her sylladex; she's got plans for it. They won't mind if she doesn't turn one weapon over to her superiors, especially when she tells them what her plans are. That has to wait, though. She's got to give her report to Senior Paladin Tristan, and then to Senior Scribe Peabody- and then her unofficial report to Jerald. She got this mission in the first place because the Scribes needed to know if someone had found viable Enclave Deathclaw-control technology before they could spare somebody to come to Megaton and get her and Jerald officially married. He deserves to know how things went before almost anybody else.
It's weird, though. There's a heck of a lot more Scribes in the corridors of B ring today than she would've expected. Something's got ... sheesh, it looks like nearly the entire Order of the Quill is stirred up today. Getting through them all to find Tristan's going to be rough.