The Citadel

Duchess Gambit unloaded and secured - check.

Equipment and holotapes taken from the St. Aubins facility delivered to the Sword and Quill Scribes - check.

Mission report delivered to Senior Paladin Tristan, Scribe Rothchild, Scribe Jameson, and Elder Lyons - check.

Personal armor turned over to the Shield scribes for post-mission repair and maintenance - check.

Dinner acquired and- well, no, not check, not yet. She's not hungry yet. Maybe later. After she's gone back to the B ring barracks and peeled herself out of the under-armor suit. After she's gotten clean, properly clean, for the first time in days, and changed into her greens. After she's looked in the mirror and then looked away very quickly from the healing but still uncomfortably livid mark on her forehead. After she's found a room, a converted closet really, but it has a door she can close and a light she can switch off, one where people won't come looking for her and Milliways won't either, where she can sit down in the dark and pull her knees up close and just tell herself that all of it is over and there are no more knives or bonesaws or lobotomized tribals or disembodied brains, that whatever else happens she probably won't ever have to go back to Point Lookout again, only she probably will, because she's good at surviving that kind of thing and the reward for being good at making it through horrible stuff is having to put down more horrible stuff so that other people don't have to-

-there's knocking on the door. Why is there knocking on the door.

"Ellen?"

... oh.

Stand up, wipe face with one hand, switch the light on; it wouldn't do to look like she's in a bad way. Not in front of-

"Jerald," she says with the most smile she can manage as she opens the door. "Hey."

"Hey," he answers. His eyes are cautious and he's hanging back a bit; she probably shouldn't be surprised. "Um. I- look, I know you probably- I wasn't following you, I was just looking for you, and Dogmeat's right over-" He jerks his thumb towards where the dog is lying nearby with his head on his paws.

"Oh," she says, and she's... not really sure what to say next. Sorry I didn't get to do more than say hi or It's been a long day or I'm not feeling well or any number of things, maybe, but none of them quite work. Not with him looking at her like he's not sure if she's going to explode or something.

"Ellen?" he says. He's bending down a little, like he's trying to get a closer look at- she glances sideways hurriedly, cuts off the thought. "Are you okay?"

That's very possibly the stupidest question she's ever heard in her life. Manners dictate that it gets an answer anyway. She draws a breath. The answer is jammed somewhere that hasn't reached the level of words yet.

"You don't have to say anything if you don't want to," he says very gently, and she closes her eyes. It's not that she doesn't want to, it's that she can't-

There's a hand on her shoulder. Not pulling, not turning, not pushing. Just a silent I'm here, you know.

He closed the door behind him, she realizes.

She's just going to lean against him and hold onto the heavy red Scribe robes he's wearing and not so much cry as sob for a while. As long as he'll let her.

It helps.

OOC: Appearance Notes

Most of Ellen's icons at this point are really not very good guides to what she actually looks like, but I don't have the photoshop skills to mark them appropriately. I'll try to link posts where her appearance is relevant to this one.

To start with, Ellen's acquired a number of visible scars on her face since leaving Vault 101. The most notable is an unpleasant-looking curved scar high on the left side of her forehead, continuing some distance into her hairline. This was surgically acquired and stitched up afterwards and has been left to heal naturally rather than accelerated with a stimpak. As of late September 2013 RL, the forehead scar is gone. Dr. McCoy used UFP medical technology to heal it up and remove it entirely.

Most of her other scars look older than they are thanks to stimpak use; she has a faded burn mark on her right cheek from a distressingly close call with a laser weapon and a few smaller marks from unfortunate encounters with knives or animal claws. She also has several notches in her right ear from where she was jumped by a knife-wielding raider when she had her helmet off.

There are other scars on her right forearm that may be visible at times, as a lot of her early armor was either leather (incapable of standing up to major attacks) or body armor with woven sleeves (capable of holding off some degree of limb damage, but not that much). They're pretty jagged and messy, as most of them were inflicted by animals such as mirelurks. Her left forearm is more intact, as it was protected by her Pip-Boy for most of her time on the surface.

(I have never been a fan of the 'beauty is never tarnished' trope. She's a fighter in a post-nuclear world in which helmets are in short supply and horrific threats to human life and health can be survived; she gets marked up all kinds of ways. That's all there is to it.)

Ellen's hair is not and has not ever been black. The desaturation in most of her icons was my attempt to render her hair color closer to steel grey. Originally this was a simple case of her family being prone to going grey prematurely, which she mentioned a time or two in Bar when people commented on her hair. After her brush with near-fatal radiation poisoning at Project Purity, her hair eventually grew back in, but it's a significantly more noticeable shade of grey, along these lines. It's straight and short, no longer than chin length, and very simply cut to make helmet use easier.


If I don't mention what she's wearing when she enters Milliways, she's got her Brotherhood fatigues on. These are a dark green version of the Army uniforms worn by the characters in Irving Berlin movies such as Holiday Inn or White Christmas. There are no American markings on them, but the Brotherhood of Steel emblem has been embroidered on the right sleeve in silver thread. A nametape on one breast pocket reads '101', and she wears a small silver collar pin to indicate Paladin's rank and another copper-colored pin to indicate chaplain duties.

If the post mentions her Vault suit or that she's wearing blue and gold, it means she's wearing her reinforced Vault 101 suit. That will look something like this. There will be an enormous '101' sewn across the back in the same shade of gold as the rest of the markings on the suit.

If I mention armor or a clanking noise when she comes in, she's wearing her Tesla armor. That will look like this, although hers has been painted silver. It's also got a lot of markings painted on the chest- the Brotherhood puts their campaign pins, medal citations, rank marks, etc. in painted form on their armor rather than handing out physical medals or pins beyond the most basic.