Big Town

Ellen had given up on wearing the stealth suit's headpiece quite some time ago. It meant she couldn't activate the stealth field, that was true- but that blasted fire in the sky would insist on beating down like a bank of hydraulic hammers. The suit got much too hot much too quickly under this kind of solar assault. She'd take her chances with being spotted if it meant she could at least shed some heat.

At least she seemed to be within reach of safety; it looked like there were rooftops up ahead, a little too well-maintained to be the work of raiders or mutants. She'd lost track of how many bears had tried to charge her during her search for the remains of the Potomac. Right now, all she wanted was to sit indoors, somewhere with four walls and a nice, low ceiling.

... hm. Looked like the place had walls, of sorts. Corrugated scrap metal and banks of half-filled sandbags blocked the space between houses' outer walls, and scraggly wire ran along the top. That could be a good sign, too. Someone cared enough to look out for their own safety here. So either it was a settlement she could beg for a rest in, or it was full of raiders who'd opted to settle down and- man, she wished she hadn't thought that. She really wished she hadn't thought that. Then again, raiders' living areas had a peculiar smell to them- probably because of their depraved pastimes with corpses- and there was none of that rotting-reek here. That was something. Still wary, she approached with care, her Gauss rifle in hand- and stopped, realizing that whoever had fortified these houses had dug a trench and let it fill with mucky water or worse. It would've taken a lot more than 'please deliver this letter' to get Ellen to put her foot in that, even armored; she paced the edge of the trench until she came to a rickety wood-and-rope bridge that hung low over the surface.

As she drew a breath, thinking to call out to whoever might be here, a man's voice cut her off. "Hey! Who are you?"

Her eyes jerked sideways from the empty, open center of town to the wall of sandbags next to the far end of the bridge. The man who'd spoken was dressed in ill-fitting combat armor the color of dust, and held his assault rifle as if he expected her to walk up and snatch it out of his hands. When he saw her looking he tightened his grip, a sort of desperate defiance coming into his eyes.

Ellen shifted the Gauss rifle to her left hand and held both hands up in her best placating gesture. "I'm not trying to hurt anyone, sir," she said. "I'm just a traveler."

He looked unconvinced. "Riiight," he said, "what do you want?"

"Someplace to cool off for a few minutes. I'm trying to find Arefu and I almost got eaten by bears."

The man winced, his armored shoulders drawing up towards his ears a moment. "Oh, I- I'm sorry," he said as he lowered his rifle. "You can never be too careful. It's not safe here- supermutants attacked us recently and carried off some of our friends." He nodded towards the bridge. "You can come in, just... don't cause any trouble, okay?"

Ellen stared at the man, suppressing a shiver. As she picked her way along the bridge he gloomily added, "And where there's one big ugly, there's ten more just waiting to grab you by the throat. Then the slavers'll come and pick over your carcass and drag what's left off to Paradise Falls."

"I don't-" Ellen shook her head. "To where, now?"

"Paradise Falls- it's nearby somewhere, I don't know where." He shook his head. "All I know is that it's where the slavers nest."

"That's... good to know," Ellen said very carefully, trying to remember if anyone had told her anything whatsoever about there being slavery on the surface. (Well, other than Moriarty charging Nova and Gob so much rent that they'd probably never make enough caps to get out of debt to him.) "I'll remember that... are they allies with the mutants, or something?"

"Not that I know of," the man said. "They're their own kind of bad news. Skulk up towards Germantown, near the police station. They always come from that direction. There isn't anything left here that hasn't been destroyed or dragged away," he added; he must have caught sight of her glancing around at the houses and the fortifications. "You're better off scavenging the dead out in the Wasteland."

Ellen shook her head slowly. "Good Lord," she murmured.

"He's a long way from here, miss," the man said. "A long, long way from here."

Timebomb

The door opens into the still, too-warm air that marks the interior of an all-metal enclosure on a summer's day. "This isn't Big Town," Ellen murmurs. "We're about five minutes' walk away. I didn't want to explain to Dusty and Kimba how I managed to come up with a complete stranger in the middle of a walled town with only one entrance."