Evergreen Mills
Mar. 11th, 2013 09:39 amThe door opens on the interior of the remains of an ancient office building. Most of the walls and parts of the floor are missing, allowing for a fine view of the rubble covering the ground two stories down, but there's just enough exterior wall remaining to provide some cover. Ellen has taken the liberty of hanging a portable chalkboard on that wall; it's got a painstakingly hand-drawn map on it. "This is where we're headed," she says. "We're a little ways north of the canyon; from this floor or what little there is of the next floor up, we have line of sight as far as this bend, here. Note the catwalks on either side of the canyon walls. They're there because the canyon has a railroad track from before the War running down the middle and the raiders who occupy the place have planted land mines on either side. The raiders patrol the catwalks on a regular schedule."
"About here, just before the canyon takes its turn and we lose line of sight, there's a tripwire connected to even more explosives. It's not a very sophisticated mechanism and it could be disarmed without too much trouble if it weren't in plain sight of every raider who could hold a gun. There's another tripwire after it, but since the canyon takes a turn at that point, anyone trying to disarm that one won't have covering fire unless they brought a buddy along."
"Over here is where the minefield stops. The railroad track splits at this point and the canyon widens out. Tracks go off to the left; that area's got a couple of tin-roofed open-air equipment shacks and a lot of old railroad cargo cars. Plenty of cover for the raiders, not to mention most of the railroad cars have some means of climbing up on top for a vantage point. The canyon wall on this side is too steep for them to scale, and there don't seem to be any openings or outcroppings, so there's that, at least."
"To the right the catwalk terminates in a tin-walled guardhouse. That tends to have one or two people in it or in front of it, probably because it overlooks the slave pens, here. I counted five or six slaves when I got in but wasn't able to make contact with any of them. There's a supply shack at ground level past the slave pens and then about five or ten yards of space before the canyon wall."
"This round object here, on your left as you pass the slave pens and supply shack, is the Behemoth's pen. The walls are a good twenty-five feet high and electrified. There's a generator just next to it that looks like the raiders could switch it off pretty easily if they needed to let the thing loose. The mutant itself is eighteen feet tall and doesn't seem to be armed, but there are motorcycles and substantial chunks of metal lying around the area that it would be perfectly capable of picking up and wielding or throwing. I've fought a few of these things before. They've got hides as thick as armor and pain tends to just make them mad. Slowing them down pretty much requires doing enough damage to physically cripple one or both legs, and even then they've got enough rage to them to keep trying to come after you just for spite. The neck in particular is ridiculously thick and tough. Wonder Woman had a hard time snapping the spine of the one we fought in the Capitol building's rotunda."
"To the right of the pen is the main factory, which has wire fencing and sandbags out front. It's built with its back up against the canyon wall. Given that this is the same rock formation that Vault 112 and Vault 87 were built into, and that Lamplight Caverns aren't too far away, I'd be really surprised if there weren't significant underground areas of the place. There are two other outlying buildings past that, further down the canyon. They're smaller and don't look like there's more than one floor to them. I wish I could give you more information than that but I wasn't able to get past the Behemoth pen without it roaring because it could smell me."
"As for the raiders themselves, there's a pretty fair number of them. I don't have an exact count. Most of them are armed with 5.56 millimeter assault rifles and twelve-gauge shotguns. A few of them are carrying disintegrator rifles of alien design- they're all but guaranteed to take apart a man-sized target on the first or second hit. The disintegrators are silver and shiny and fire blobs of energy, so they're pretty easy to recognize. I'm trying to get the slaves out of here and get those disintegrator rifles out of these people's hands before they become a threat to the rest of the Wasteland... anyway, I think that's probably about it. Any questions?"
"About here, just before the canyon takes its turn and we lose line of sight, there's a tripwire connected to even more explosives. It's not a very sophisticated mechanism and it could be disarmed without too much trouble if it weren't in plain sight of every raider who could hold a gun. There's another tripwire after it, but since the canyon takes a turn at that point, anyone trying to disarm that one won't have covering fire unless they brought a buddy along."
"Over here is where the minefield stops. The railroad track splits at this point and the canyon widens out. Tracks go off to the left; that area's got a couple of tin-roofed open-air equipment shacks and a lot of old railroad cargo cars. Plenty of cover for the raiders, not to mention most of the railroad cars have some means of climbing up on top for a vantage point. The canyon wall on this side is too steep for them to scale, and there don't seem to be any openings or outcroppings, so there's that, at least."
"To the right the catwalk terminates in a tin-walled guardhouse. That tends to have one or two people in it or in front of it, probably because it overlooks the slave pens, here. I counted five or six slaves when I got in but wasn't able to make contact with any of them. There's a supply shack at ground level past the slave pens and then about five or ten yards of space before the canyon wall."
"This round object here, on your left as you pass the slave pens and supply shack, is the Behemoth's pen. The walls are a good twenty-five feet high and electrified. There's a generator just next to it that looks like the raiders could switch it off pretty easily if they needed to let the thing loose. The mutant itself is eighteen feet tall and doesn't seem to be armed, but there are motorcycles and substantial chunks of metal lying around the area that it would be perfectly capable of picking up and wielding or throwing. I've fought a few of these things before. They've got hides as thick as armor and pain tends to just make them mad. Slowing them down pretty much requires doing enough damage to physically cripple one or both legs, and even then they've got enough rage to them to keep trying to come after you just for spite. The neck in particular is ridiculously thick and tough. Wonder Woman had a hard time snapping the spine of the one we fought in the Capitol building's rotunda."
"To the right of the pen is the main factory, which has wire fencing and sandbags out front. It's built with its back up against the canyon wall. Given that this is the same rock formation that Vault 112 and Vault 87 were built into, and that Lamplight Caverns aren't too far away, I'd be really surprised if there weren't significant underground areas of the place. There are two other outlying buildings past that, further down the canyon. They're smaller and don't look like there's more than one floor to them. I wish I could give you more information than that but I wasn't able to get past the Behemoth pen without it roaring because it could smell me."
"As for the raiders themselves, there's a pretty fair number of them. I don't have an exact count. Most of them are armed with 5.56 millimeter assault rifles and twelve-gauge shotguns. A few of them are carrying disintegrator rifles of alien design- they're all but guaranteed to take apart a man-sized target on the first or second hit. The disintegrators are silver and shiny and fire blobs of energy, so they're pretty easy to recognize. I'm trying to get the slaves out of here and get those disintegrator rifles out of these people's hands before they become a threat to the rest of the Wasteland... anyway, I think that's probably about it. Any questions?"