Deathclaws

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Good luck to anyone standing between the Milliways front door and the Milliways back door today. A streak of brownish-green slams the front door open and vanishes through the back door as fast as normal human legs can carry it, surpassed only by the grey blur just at its heels. Neither one stops moving until they're both well outside, somewhere near the pells, among all the green; only then does it resolve into Ellen and Dogmeat, both panting frantically and trying not to fall over.

Thank God for stimpaks, they do wonders at closing up even the horrible wounds out there, but there's nothing short of God or Angus MacGyver that'll be saving that suit of combat armor she's got on now.

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[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

"You all right, lass?" Spoon says with a long, slow blink at the girl and dog. He's asking the same of the dog, in canine, and holding his sword in a rather funny angle thanks to how he paused his workout.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

GIANT HORRIBLE BAD SMELLING MUTANT MONSTER DEATH LIZARDS! says the dog.

"Deathclaws!" Ellen says, at almost exactly the same time. "Ohgod. So. Many. Deathclaws. Just-"

THEY TRIED TO EAT ME, the dog announces, and his expression is halfway between fear-biting and the 'put 'em up, c'mon, put 'em up' of a punch-drunk boxer.

"The whole place is full of them-"

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

Blink. Blink. Blink.

"D' you want help?" he waves vaguely with the non-sword hand, "I have weapons. An' a hankering for trophies."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Guns?" Ellen says, and tries ineffectually to wipe at her face. Olney is a dusty place, and blood and dust don't mix well no matter whose blood it is. "Big ones?"

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

"Plasma cannon. Throwing mines. Other dribs and drabs." he's going to at least try one-on-one if he can get the herd thin enough. It's a yautja thing.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen's not sure she's ever seen a plasma rifle in action, but it sounds like about the right level of destructiveness for these creatures. "Okay," she says. "Because I've seen three people empty their assault rifles into one and it still gutted them. But, but, okay, that's... yeah."

Adrenaline: a thing that ebbs.

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

"Take another deep breath." Spoon suggests, "An' then another one, then try explaining things a little more clearly."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Nodding, Ellen runs both hands over her face a few times. This does not help at all. Well, maybe in a camouflage kind of way.

"Okay," she finally says. "It's like this... my world's kind of nasty. About two hundred years ago, we had a nuclear war between the United States and Red China, and it's still pretty much awful as anything out there. There's a lot of mutated species roaming around the Wasteland- that's where I live, it's near where Washington DC used to be... anyway. Giant bugs, mostly. Giant bears. Mole rats bigger than him." She indicates Dogmeat. "Stuff like that. And, sometimes, these... I don't know, fifteen foot long... horrendous lizard things, with horns, and claws, and fangs. They're called Deathclaws. They're fast and silent and smart, and I'd only ever seen one before, when three people were trying to kill it in the Super-Duper Mart parking lot. It wouldn't die, it just kept moving- I finally got a sniper bullet in its head and finished it off."

"And I just wandered into the ruins of a town where there's Deathclaws around every single corner. So. Many. Deathclaws."

She indicates her armor. It is not happy armor.

"I think I ashed one of them with the gun I got from the aliens a while ago, but there's so many of them..."

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

Spoon listens carefully, "Never heard of Deathclaws before. Do me a favour of explaining them from the ground up?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen thinks for a moment. Eventually she says, "Lizard things with sort of pink hides. Very thick hides. Spikes down the back, and horns on the head, and a mouthful of teeth. They walk on their hind legs, and they've got a tail almost as long as I am tall. Claws like this-"

She holds up two fingers, about six inches apart.

"They move very quietly, and they like to leap at what they're hunting and strike with their claws on their hands, but they can use their feet, too. One of them almost got Dogmeat that way."

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

"How thick is the hide? How fast are they?" Very important information for when he goes and armors up.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen indicates something considerably thicker than any natural leather ought to be, unless perhaps said leather came from the back of an elephant. "And in the time it takes me to fire my Disintegrator three times, they can leap a good ten yards and strike maybe twice."

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

"All right." Spoon says calmly, "I'm going to go put me armor on. You two stay here an' catch your breath."

It doesn't take him long to get dressed in hunting gear with plenty of explosives and the plasma cannon.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

... yes. Yes, that looks about right.

"Thank you," says Ellen, after the initial assessing look. "My name's Ellen Park, by the way. This is Dogmeat."

"WHURF," says Dogmeat.

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

"Right now, in this get-up, I'd be the god-ranked Hunter Kou-te'bpe. Means crazy man who kills things with his teeth. Everyone not yautja calls me Spoon. It's complicated." And a little bit embarrassing, if he's honest. "Pleased to meet you, Ellen." and you, Dogmeat.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Okay," says Ellen. "That's fine. Spoon's a good name."

She deals with people who have names like Crazy Wolfgang or Tree Father Birch. Spoon? Fine.

"Are you going to need any stimpaks? They'll close up the edges of a wound and start the healing as long as you hold the wound together while they work..."

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

"Unless your Deathclaws come with silver claws I'll be fine." his manic grin is invisible behind the mask, but some of it may leak out in his voice, "I'm not human, lass. I heal a damn sight better than you."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Oh. All right," says Ellen. She is very, very good at accepting things, and she long ago stopped asking people if they were mutants. "No, there's no silver anywhere in the Wasteland, as far as I know. Unless it's a fork or something."

She glances over towards the Bar.

"I'm, um... ready if you are."

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

"I'm ready." Spoon says, flicking the little switch that turns the targeting on his plasma cannon on. The three red dots are, he hopes, comforting.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen's never seen laser sighting before, as all the sighted weapons she knows have target scopes or iron sights, but it's not as if it's anything disturbing, either. She nods and gestures to Dogmeat to follow them before heading back to the Bar and opening the front door.

The other side of the door opens onto an alley that stinks of things Spoon is no doubt familiar with. If the yautja have a word for sick meat, this is it: someone, maybe more than one someone, died here. They weren't all that fresh to begin with, either. Long-term severe radiation exposure does that to a body.

Beyond that, there's not much to smell, save the pungent odor of a species long ago mutated from something small and harmless into something huge and terrible. And the old, old smell of concrete and steel and glass, broken and blasted and left to fall apart under two hundred Septembers' worth of beating Wasteland sun.

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

It would be unfair to say that Spoon has learned caution. He's learned a little bit of defence from Glorfindel, and he's regained some stealth, but caution? It's foreign to him.

"Lead on." he says quietly. He'll take the lead when there are actually things to kill, finding them is probably something she'll be better at. At least until he knows which scent belongs to the prey.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen nods and moves forward. "I'd activate a Stealth Boy," she murmurs, "but the field only cloaks myself, not Dogmeat, and he just doesn't get that they're bigger than his teeth can handle."

She indicates a scorched, pinkish corpse not far away. "Got that one before," she notes. "I don't think it even noticed it was on fire until it died."

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

Spoon nods, bending to look the corpse over carefully from charred head to toes. You need to be more careful, lad. If you misjudge, your Ellen will be all alone. Denseness of the skin, a gentle testing of the sharpness of it's claws against his armour, he evaluates it carefully and then turns to Ellen and says; "I was going to ask if you wanted to go back to Milliways and wait for me, but I think that'd be an insult. So lets move on."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

I can't not protect her, Dogmeat answers, and then goes very still. A moment later he's growling, head lowered, ears pointed towards a nearby alleyway.

Ellen hisses under her breath and draws an odd little pistol that resembles something out of an old sci-fi comic book.

[there-is-a-me.livejournal.com]

Didn't say you should. Saying you need to be smart about it. Sometimes a warning is more important than a bite. Spoon's target snaps on again and there is a very faint whine as the laser warms up.