aaaaaaaagh_sky | Museum Station

Annabelle will no doubt recognize the cast of the sunlight and the thin dry feel of the air when she and Ellen emerge at last from the reeking Metro tunnels. They're on the opposite side of the Mall from last time, though, and the steps up on this side aren't anywhere near the same- they're rusted, corroded, two-hundred-year-old escalator steps, frozen in place with the weight of time and decay. "I don't hear too much from here," Ellen reports, "but I'm all out of Stealth Boys, so we'd better be careful. There might be mutants."

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From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

Ellen nods, and sets out at a trot with Dogmeat at her side.

Under ordinary circumstances, an abandoned hospital would be considered creepy as hell- especially one that smelled like this. But the thing about Our Lady of Hope is that... well, it's really no worse than anywhere else in this world. Yes, there's bizarre equipment lying around, and skeletal remains here, there, and everywhere else, but it's like that pretty much anywhere Ellen's been so far. There's nothing any more sinister about the place than there is about, say, a ruined office building.

Well. Except for the hideous three-tongued thing walking on four downward-facing arms and spewing brown, radioactive spittle at them from the landing up above.

Edited Date: 2009-12-20 05:36 am (UTC)

From:

aeons_crackshot

The bizarre equipment and remains faintly bring to mind various Rational Experimentation Group labs, which doesn't help Annabelle's peace of mind. At least, to the best of her knowledge, no one was experimented on within these walls.

Annabelle is bringing up the rifle and aiming even as part of her mind is going ?!?. "Somebody's been beat severely with the ugly stick," she quips as she aims for what she hopes is its brain.

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

"Tongue monster," Ellen identifies. "They don't usually travel alone-"

Ah, there; a greenskin's come running up behind it, shouting, "HOT POTATO!" Know what's a fun thing to do in the Wasteland if you're already on edge? Blow up grenades remotely by means of an energy weapon blast to the gigantic green hand holding them.

Boy howdy is that ever one unhappy supermutant. And the tongue monster, well... same general idea.

From:

aeons_crackshot

If the tongue monster is still twitching, Annabelle will finish it off with another bullet. (Better safe than sorry, as it were.)

"Good shooting!" she shouts with a grin as Ellen blows up the grenade with her energy weapon.

After that, well, the humane thing to do would be to put the mutant out of its misery, right?

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

Oh hell yes. Not to mention the sensible thing, given that the mutant's apparent reaction to the exploded grenade is to howl in agony and then charge at the two humans, swinging its remaining fist. Annabelle's either committing self-defense or humanitarian mercy, and either way at the end of it, the supermutant's going down.

When both the horrors are dead Ellen glances at the doorframe, and then starts wiping what she can of the mutant remains away from a spot next to the door. "There's a building layout here," she explains. "For people trying to escape fires, I guess. It looks like... okay, it looks like we're on the first floor. We need to go up one more floor and then sprint like the dickens through the old infectious disease ward- see, this is the street where the Statesman is,so that'd be where our bridge is. Man, I hope the muties aren't looking for any more of their green stuff here."

From:

aeons_crackshot

"Handy," Annabelle replies with a small smile as Ellen uncovers the map.

"Green stuff?"

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

"That's what they call it," Ellen says. "I'm not sure what's in it. But there were mutants at the Germantown police station talking about how they had to find more, and this one greenskin who called himself Uncle Leo told me that they capture people alive to take them to some kind of cold metal place and try to make more of themselves. And Harold the tree-man told me he and an old friend of his found vats of green goo in a military base out west, and how the tree started growing out of his head after they got into a fight and his friend got dropped in the goo..."

From:

aeons_crackshot

"Some of that sounds uncomfortably familiar," Annabelle says with a grim expression. "I'm beginning to wonder if the beasts that haunt your world were made by men and just escaped when everything went to pieces."

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

"I know the fire ants were," Ellen says. "Made by men, I mean. Dr. Lesko used Fo-"

She stops, looking at the map of the hospital floor, but not seeing it.

"Forced Evolutionary Virus," she says at last. "He was trying to make them shrink back down to ordinary ant size, but they developed the ability to breathe fire after he exposed them to something called Forced Evolutionary Virus...."

From:

aeons_crackshot

Annabelle would put a hand on Ellen's shoulder in comfort, but she's rather covered in blood at the moment.

"Diseases don't tend to stay in one place," Annabelle says quietly, remembering the Spanish Influenza epidemic that killed her mother. "Did he say where he got the virus from?"

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

"Just that it was a sample," Ellen says. "And tailored to only latch onto insect DNA. I think that much might be right, since nobody who came with us into Grayditch developed any mutations or anything, but..." Ellen shakes her head. "That must be what the green goo is. Radiation doesn't always glow, or I'd have a much easier time avoiding water, and it's definitely not gooey- so what else could make a mutant except a virus like that?"

From:

aeons_crackshot

Annabelle nods, "And you'd think that radiation would be more...random in it's effect," she says with a sigh.

"It looks like your world had its share of madmen even before the War," she adds with a shake of her head. "I suppose that leaves us with the task of doing what we can for the sake of the present and the future."

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

"And speaking of the present," Ellen says, "we should get moving. The Rangers don't need us to hang around here talking, even if they're dead. How fast can you run from here?"

From:

aeons_crackshot

"Pretty fast," Annabelle replies. "I'm no sprinter, but I'm not slow either."

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

"Okay," says Ellen. "Then let's get up the stairs and-" She hesitates, glancing down at Dogmeat. "Well.... I'm going to have to sprint. Otherwise someone might get some ideas."

From:

aeons_crackshot

Annabelle grins, "He does seem to like getting into scraps."

"I'll follow you as quickly as I can." Who knows, she may even be as fast as Ellen.

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

"He attacked a robot once," Ellen says. "As in metal."

Dogmeat just wags his tail. Hooray! people are paying attention to him!

"Anyway. Let's get moving...."

From:

aeons_crackshot

Annabelle chuckles at that.

"Agreed. I think I may even be able to keep up with you, as we're about evenly matched, weight wise."

After that, there will be stair climbing and sprinting through an abandoned hospital filled with mutants.

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

"All right..."

The stairs aren't so bad, though they're a little iffy structurally speaking. It's what happens on the other side of the door that's the problem, because holy cow are there ever mutants in the infectious disease ward, and they're whipping out guns and nailboards and grenades with equal horrible abandon...

(On the bright side, there are so many possible threats to his human that Dogmeat doesn't know who to attack.)

From:

aeons_crackshot

"I think speed is going to be our friend!" Annabelle shouts in dismay as she pulls out both pistols. (There is no way she's going to have time to reload the rifle.)

Annabelle sprints very quickly through the ward, aiming for the grenades being hoisted by the mutants. It won't be enough to kill them, but it will hopefully keep the two of them from explosive death.

Run, run as fast as you can....

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

It's something, at least. Ellen's doing her best to keep the air as filled with blazing bolts of alien energy as possible as she runs, just so that it's not filled lead instead. The net result of it all is a nightmarish combination of flashing, booming, gun stink, meat stink, and shouting- both from the mutants and from Ellen's suit, which is roaring, "You're a soldier, not a civvy! Have some vitamin M and suck it up!"

And up ahead, the light of day winks through a hole in the outermost wall, gleaming off the form of rickety, fragile metal...

From:

aeons_crackshot

Annabelle curses at the sight of how fragile the metal is, but she keeps moving at a run. One mutant with a minigun gets 2 shots in the head, causing it to roar with pain and accidentally hit another mutant with fire from its gun.

Right before she passes through the opening, she turns to take a shot at any mutants that might be getting too close for comfort. The weight of those mutants following them onto that fragile metal could be the end of both of them....

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

Fortunately, the mutants have just enough sense not to pursue them out onto the bridge. They're too busy howling and reloading, and firing through the gap in the wall instead. And with that kind of impetus it's really easy to ignore the fragility of the bridge underfoot until both humans and the dog are safely on the other side.

Ellen's gone very pale, but she doesn't stop once they hit the gap in the wall of the Statesman. "Door," she manages. "Get it open- need to get inside-"

Best be careful. There's a good chunk of the floor missing here, too, and the slightest misstep could easily send everyone down to a lower level. Who knows what they'd have to fight to get back up?

From:

aeons_crackshot

Annabelle skirts carefully around the gap in the floor and moves to open the door.

The door fails to move the first time she yanks on it, and Annabelle curses and yanks again with all of her strength.

What should happen is this: the door, its mechanism long rusted and unmaintained, cannot be opened. Thus, our heroes must jump down through the hole in the floor and battle their way upwards through hordes of mutants. In 999 out of a 1000 universes, a man could waste a lifetime and never apply the correct amount of force at precisely the right angle to force the door to yield.

The Inspired, however, are fortune's favorite children, and what is and what could be tend to shift ever so slightly in their favor. The force of the blow hits at precisely the right angle and the right moment to jar the rusted mechanism loose, and the hinges scream in protest as the door is forced open.