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Two Months
Mar. 2nd, 2012 11:05 amThere was a visit to Oasis, a solo one. The Treeminders were still wary of being found by too many outsiders. Ellen came away from that with seeds of every kind of plant that grew in the valley, and with the thanks of not only the Treeminders, but of Harold himself. A visitor who brought news was a rare thing.
There were the trips to the factory. The road to RobCo was never what you’d call safe; there were raiders about, although they grew less each time, and there was wildlife, which never really diminished. On one trip Ellen crossed paths with an Outcast patrol who wanted to know why some dirty Wastelander who rode a cow was decked out in power armor with Brotherhood markings. It ended without bloodshed, but Ellen resolved privately to buy a defense robot from Tinker Joe the next time she saw him. Just in case. It would be a long time before the factory could turn out anything to do the job, after all.
(She owed a robot to Dean. But that would require going back to the Bar. That required the Bar, period.)
There were the books, of course. Moira had her copy of the Arlington archives and was printing them out just as fast as she possibly could. Paper was the limiting factor, although after some tinkering and more than a few horrible smells from upstairs, Moira announced that she’d found a process that could bleach even the most stained, illegible paper back to usefulness. Any ruined books Ellen or anyone else could find became fodder for the rapidly growing Craterside Library.
(Not all the books held joy of discovery, though. Moira printed up one of the archive’s Bibles for Ellen as a special gift. She sat down to read it and found innumerable verses in the Arlington version that she’d never seen before, and others that were completely different from the way she remembered learning them. The other Bibles in the archive were the same way, no matter which version, no matter the translation. It made sense, in a horrible kind of way. Why would Vault-Tec allow religious material that encouraged people to go out and evangelize into a Vault designed from the beginning never to be opened? One more experiment, one more lie…)
There was battle, of course. Mutants, mostly. Ellen wondered a little how many people there might ever have been in the Wasteland if the greenskins hadn't been carrying prisoners off to make monsters for all these years. (How many people there had been in the Pitt, who'd degenerated into trogs. How many people of the Wasteland had been fed to that monster of a city. How many lost, how many wasted, how many who might have been…) But the mutants, at least, would one day end. Fawkes was working with the Pride, with the Scribes. The thermobarics were ready. Once they had the chems and the suits to protect whoever could drop down from a Vertibird directly into Vault 87's front door, they'd sweep that place from one end to the other, take every last scrap of data its computers still held, and then purge it all with fire. That day was coming.
There was more than one long walk in the dark, too. That had been the first thing Knight-Captain Colvin had trained Ellen in, and though she'd only been at his side for a few months now, it was something she would never forget. That was the last thing to be done for any Brother who fell: to make the journey with whatever could be recovered of them through the Metro tunnels to Arlington, whatever the dangers in the darkness might be.
(She'd thought, as a kid, that when people in the Vault died the Overseer took them down a long tunnel that led to another Vault somewhere far away, and handed them over to that Vault's overseer halfway there. This… this wasn't so different.)
That wasn't all. There were other lessons from Colvin. That was a strange experience for the both of them- for her because what he had to teach was so different from Reverend Avellone's approach, for him because he'd never had to work with a chaplain candidate who hadn't been born into the Brotherhood before. There was a lot of philosophy that had to be laid down first, the beliefs and arguments and understandings of two hundred years of soldier-priests and how they'd led up to the ideas and ideals of Lyons' followers. What you didn't understand, he said, you couldn't uphold, and that was true whether it was the technology of the past or the need for securing the future for all of humankind. Other things would come later, but what they did here, now, whether in battle or in the lab? All of it was an act of preparation, a sign of faith in the future they or their descendants would one day see.
And in the end… Ellen was good with that. She really was. Because if nothing else, for all their flaws the Brotherhood had never lied to her. That was something she could believe in.
There were the trips to the factory. The road to RobCo was never what you’d call safe; there were raiders about, although they grew less each time, and there was wildlife, which never really diminished. On one trip Ellen crossed paths with an Outcast patrol who wanted to know why some dirty Wastelander who rode a cow was decked out in power armor with Brotherhood markings. It ended without bloodshed, but Ellen resolved privately to buy a defense robot from Tinker Joe the next time she saw him. Just in case. It would be a long time before the factory could turn out anything to do the job, after all.
(She owed a robot to Dean. But that would require going back to the Bar. That required the Bar, period.)
There were the books, of course. Moira had her copy of the Arlington archives and was printing them out just as fast as she possibly could. Paper was the limiting factor, although after some tinkering and more than a few horrible smells from upstairs, Moira announced that she’d found a process that could bleach even the most stained, illegible paper back to usefulness. Any ruined books Ellen or anyone else could find became fodder for the rapidly growing Craterside Library.
(Not all the books held joy of discovery, though. Moira printed up one of the archive’s Bibles for Ellen as a special gift. She sat down to read it and found innumerable verses in the Arlington version that she’d never seen before, and others that were completely different from the way she remembered learning them. The other Bibles in the archive were the same way, no matter which version, no matter the translation. It made sense, in a horrible kind of way. Why would Vault-Tec allow religious material that encouraged people to go out and evangelize into a Vault designed from the beginning never to be opened? One more experiment, one more lie…)
There was battle, of course. Mutants, mostly. Ellen wondered a little how many people there might ever have been in the Wasteland if the greenskins hadn't been carrying prisoners off to make monsters for all these years. (How many people there had been in the Pitt, who'd degenerated into trogs. How many people of the Wasteland had been fed to that monster of a city. How many lost, how many wasted, how many who might have been…) But the mutants, at least, would one day end. Fawkes was working with the Pride, with the Scribes. The thermobarics were ready. Once they had the chems and the suits to protect whoever could drop down from a Vertibird directly into Vault 87's front door, they'd sweep that place from one end to the other, take every last scrap of data its computers still held, and then purge it all with fire. That day was coming.
There was more than one long walk in the dark, too. That had been the first thing Knight-Captain Colvin had trained Ellen in, and though she'd only been at his side for a few months now, it was something she would never forget. That was the last thing to be done for any Brother who fell: to make the journey with whatever could be recovered of them through the Metro tunnels to Arlington, whatever the dangers in the darkness might be.
(She'd thought, as a kid, that when people in the Vault died the Overseer took them down a long tunnel that led to another Vault somewhere far away, and handed them over to that Vault's overseer halfway there. This… this wasn't so different.)
That wasn't all. There were other lessons from Colvin. That was a strange experience for the both of them- for her because what he had to teach was so different from Reverend Avellone's approach, for him because he'd never had to work with a chaplain candidate who hadn't been born into the Brotherhood before. There was a lot of philosophy that had to be laid down first, the beliefs and arguments and understandings of two hundred years of soldier-priests and how they'd led up to the ideas and ideals of Lyons' followers. What you didn't understand, he said, you couldn't uphold, and that was true whether it was the technology of the past or the need for securing the future for all of humankind. Other things would come later, but what they did here, now, whether in battle or in the lab? All of it was an act of preparation, a sign of faith in the future they or their descendants would one day see.
And in the end… Ellen was good with that. She really was. Because if nothing else, for all their flaws the Brotherhood had never lied to her. That was something she could believe in.