Rock Creek Caverns

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

The door opens onto the hot and dusty landscape of June in the Capital Wasteland. Specifically, onto the interior of what was once a halfway-decent barn. These days a good half the slats that used to form the walls are gone, and the roof's mostly collapsed- but, hey, it has a door.

(Also it has the carcass of a giant scorpion, but that's neither here nor there.)

"All right, guys," Ellen says. "This seemed like the safest place to start, out of everyone's way."

Comments

[luvs_yogurt]

Michael follows suit with his shades, hooking them in his pocket before drawing his combat knife with his off hand. The laser pistol is light enough to fire mostly accurately even one handed and judging by Ellen's flaming machete and the low visibility they're gonna be getting up close and personal with whatever it is.

"We should stick close together in a loose triangle formation - between the three of us we should be able to see anything coming even in low light."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"You get ghouls down here," Ellen says as they pass signs for Abraxo cleaner and the Virgo 11 lander at the Museum of Technology. "Radiation victims who've lost their minds and gone feral. They look like walking corpses and they'll attack anything that moves. It's an act of mercy to put them down, because as far as I can tell, they don't die of old age. They stay like that until something kills them."

The turnstiles collapsed long ago and the Nuka-Cola vending machine on the wall is no longer lit. The Eat-o-Tronic 3000 snack machine looks like it was raided recently.

"Probably radroaches, too, those are common enough. Maybe molerats the size of Dogmeat. We won't see any more mirelurks until we get to the Cavern area, though. They stay near water."

[fullofmercy]

"Well, that's a start," he says, blinking until his eyes adjust to the gloom. The air tastes stale and thick down here, heavy with the scent of dirt and metal and cement.

It's like a horror-house version of a plant, sounds echoing strangely against the walls and floor and ceiling.

Michael's right about the formation they ought to take: the man seems to know what he's talking about, so Wolfwood follows suit, looking around as they head further down and in, eying the shadows and any openings that look as though something could ambush them from within.

[luvs_yogurt]

He can hear them before he can see them, the low growl-hiss of monsters lurking in the darkness. By the time Michael can make out three shambling figures in the darkness, Dogmeat is already charging down the corridor - he fires two shots blindly toward what he assumes is a head, only one catches but it's enough to get a good look at what he can't believe he's seeing.

Fucking zombies. They look like zombies at least, nothing bits of flesh and cloth hanging off of brown-green skeletons with dead white eyes.

"They're coming."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen's blade flames into life. "Aim for the center. They don't need headshots to die," she says; it's dark and the tunnel isn't a good place to take chances on a small target.

And then there's no more time to talk, because the first of the ferals is lunging at them, emaciated arms flailing for all it's worth. That needs fire and steel- and she's got plenty of both right now.

[fullofmercy]

He grimaces at the sight, lifting the Colt to shoot and emptying all six bullets into one of the ghouls, who might have been a man once but who is now nothing but a mindless horror.

Legato would love this place.

Ellen's short sword is handy here, but he can't keep shooting when she's in close combat with the things, so he hefts the Punisher and tosses it at a feral. The cross lands with a heavy clang, crushing the thing into the wall.

Full of mercy, huh?

He reloads, taking aim at a shifting, horrifying figure far enough away from Ellen that he won't have to worry about hitting her.

[luvs_yogurt]

Michael's happy to forego shooting - they seem vulnerable enough and seeing Wolfwood's pistol out of use, he surges forward and slams another into a wall, plunging the knife between it's eyes until it doesn't move anymore.

He may not watch movies or tv often - but he knows how to kill a zombie. The principle works on pretty much anything with a brain.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

It works. All of it works. That's the thing about ferals- they aren't zombies, not properly. Oh, they look the part, but there's no unstoppable force or unspeakable virus animating their corpses. Hurt them, make them bleed, and while they may not react to it in any sensible way, they'll drop of the damage eventually.

(Although the one in front of Ellen doesn't seem to notice it's actively on fire until an especially impassioned strike sends it reeling into the wall. It does not get up.)

[fullofmercy]

"Not very bright, are they?"

Holstering the pistol, he walks forward to retrieve the Punisher, looking down on the crumpled remains beneath it with a grim expression.

He's not sure radiation zombies are any better than mindless puppets of humans controlled by Legato, but at least these don't have lives and families to go back to.

[luvs_yogurt]

Coming down from the moment, Michael wipes his blade across the tatters of the thing's shorts, clenching his fingers around the grip.

"I hear more of them ahead, a lot of them at varying distance."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"That's why they're feral. Regular ghouls are just like anybody else, brain-wise," Ellen says. "Ferals haven't got anything left."

She shifts her blade to her left hand and flicks a switch on her Pip-Boy, checking the screen.

"The break we're aiming for isn't far from here. We may run into more of these. Let's keep moving and hope we beat the rush."

She's not desperate enough to search a feral ghoul for supplies. As for the fact that these were people once, she'll pray for them when they're somewhere safe. Not now.

[fullofmercy]

He can hear them, up ahead. The tunnels amplify sound and make it echo, turning every shuffling scuffle of detritus into footsteps or an ambush. His fingers are tight around the strap of the Punisher, knuckles turning white.

Possibly he should be worried about the radiation himself, but if Ellen isn't, then he'll let it slide.

It can't be worse than being near Knives.

[luvs_yogurt]

Trying not to think about it, Michael falls back into the formation and peers into the increasingly easy darkness. His boot catches a discarded soda bottle and sends it skittering down the rail to a caved in block.

"The apocalypse," he asks quiety, the question digging at him, "it was a war, right? In the United States?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen's not worried about the radiation. Her Geiger counter isn't doing more than the most basic background tck-tck once in a while. If there were Glowing Ones, maybe, but...

Well, she'll deal with that should the situation arise.

"Hm?" she says as she continues along the rail, Jangles' lights sweeping the side of the tunnel. "Oh. Yes. The United States and Red China engaged in two hours of nuclear exchange on October the twenty-third, two thousand seventy-seven. At nine-forty-seven in the morning Eastern time, if all the stopped clocks I find in the ruins are right and the fact that there are child-sized skeletons in the schools I've been to are anything to go by. There'd been a decade and a half of conventional warfare over resources before that. Oil, mostly, but other things, too. And there'd been smaller nuclear incidents before that. I think I remember my history class saying there was a city in the Middle East destroyed by a nuclear bomb one December after the oil fields ran dry, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was."

Well.

He did ask.

[fullofmercy]

It's a strangely familiar-sounding story.

"I was always told that the first settlers left their world to find another because they'd ruined it with warfare," he says. "Nuclear doesn't sound familiar, but rest of it does. From what I remember, a handful took ships and went to terraform a new world."

Too bad they crashed on Gunsmoke, instead.

"I suppose that wasn't an option here."

[luvs_yogurt]

It shouldn't affect him, he shouldn't feel his eyes burning as she talks about what to her must be ancient history - but to him feels all to possible. Child sized skeletons. Resource wars. Oil.

Most civilians in his world don't know just how close to a possibility war over resources is, but the government has known since shortly after World War II that the next most likely wouldn't be about a global power trying to emerge... it'd be about resources.

"I've spent the better part of my career in the Middle East and Africa, presumably as part of the country's efforts to make sure something like that doesn't happen."

It's all palliative, of course, the eventual world war is inevitable - but probably not in his lifetime.

He swallows the lingering feeling of familiarity and sadness with a sigh. "I'm not exactly a patriot, but it's good to know my United States dodged the bullet on that one."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Historically we did have space travel," Ellen says. "But not very far. I don't think we ever even landed a man on Mars, the next planet out. The last manned Moon mission was in 2052, which was the same year the Texas oil fields ran dry and the United Nations was dissolved- we didn't have the wherewithal to launch a spacecraft after that. So another planet was more or less out of the question, unless they came up with some atomic-powered way to lift it. And there wasn't time to make that happen."

She glances up ahead, listening carefully.

"Our tunnel is around the next left turn," she says. "It's just a maintenance tunnel, not an actual Metro tunnel. It'll give way to an unfinished, natural tunnel with a downward slope, according to the map, and after that we'll be in the outskirts of the Rock Creek cavern system. I've got some Rad-X with me- if you take it now, it'll block your body from absorbing most of the radiation we're likely to encounter in the wetter areas. I've also got Rad-Away for afterwards, if we get exposed."

[fullofmercy]

He slants a sidelong glance at Michael as he speaks, without comment: the guy talks like someone familiar with a warzone. It's an old story, and a sad one, and he'd be willing to bet this other hired companion has plenty of stories of his own, but that's a conversation for a different time and place.

Just like Vash, though, his smile is sad.

"That would be appreciated," he tells Ellen, turning to her. "How much radiation are we talking about? Enough to turn us into ghouls like those?"

He jerks his head back at the once-human things they'd fought their way past.

[luvs_yogurt]

Michael listens, pretty interested in that answer himself even as he downs the capsule without a second thought. Radiation, great...

Sure he'd been warned, but there was just something a little frightening about the knowledge you're about to soak it in. Still, his head back on the mission, he he switches out his laser pistol for the assault rifle in preparation for what was to come.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"No. Nowhere near that much," Ellen says. "Ghouls happen when someone absorbs what ought to have been a lethal dose of radiation and don't die. That's around... usually it's around seven or eight hundred rads over an extended period of time. Most people who absorb that much radiation don't wind up that way, either. Just the really unlucky ones. If we wind up anywhere near that much, the first thing we do is pull out, and the second thing we do is dose up on enough Rad-Away to chelate it out of our bodies immediately. The side effects will be unpleasant, but they're just side effects. They'll end."

She glances up and down the tunnel as they round the corner, and then sheathes the Shishkebab in favor of her plasma rifle again.

"There's bound to be 'lurks down here," she says as she eases Jangles through the gap they're trying to enter. "The map called it the Mirelurk King's Treasure Chamber, though, so there may be those. That's not a title or a sign of society, by the way. Mirelurk Kings are another species. If you hear any weird screaming noises, that's them- they have an odd sort of sonic attack that strikes from a distance. No armor, thank goodness, so shoot them as soon as you see them. They look a bit like people, but with webbed stuff under their arms, and gills, and no noses."

[fullofmercy]

"Good to know."

He swallows the capsule without any other questions, noting that Michael's done the same. "I wouldn't do much for the orphans if I died of radiation poisoning."

In fact, they'd be worse off than ever. Nobody would be there to protect them from Legato, though at least they wouldn't be used as leverage anymore.

No, they'd probably just get put on the same path he's taken. Which might be worse.

"This chamber: how big are we talking?"

[luvs_yogurt]

Without asking, Michael readies the rifle and walks several paces ahead - scouting the immediate area. The caves are damp with glowing fungus that almost provides a sort of ambient light and he can hear the soft shuffle of movement a ways ahead.

Quietly, he adds; "How smart are these things? You think we could maybe channel several of them into one of the narrow stretches and make them come at us one at a time?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"There's going to be several smaller caves and tunnels," Ellen says, "but the main chamber is long enough to house a baseball diamond, if you didn't mind having to modify the pop-fly rule to take the ceiling into account." She pauses. "That... probably didn't make any sense to you. I'm sorry."

She fishes out the map and indicates the approximate measurements of the various smaller caves, and then the biggest one.

"The kings aren't much smarter than the crabs, but they hunt based on what they hear, from what I've seen. We could probably lure them after us if we threw things the right way or moved around where they thought they could hear us and follow us."

[fullofmercy]

He gives her a blank look: baseball? What does that have to do with gemstones? And the who concept of 'pop fly' is something he doesn't have the faintest clue about.

Still, it's easy enough to gauge from the maps and Ellen's descriptions. The biggest cavern is probably about the size of a plant: not the building surrounding it, the glass globe itself.

Plenty of room for the Punisher to do its work.

He follows Michael along the tunnel, shoes scuffing as it begins to slope downhill. "If they can hit us from a distance, I'm mostly concerned with getting as good of a vantage point as possible and get them first."

[luvs_yogurt]

Between the map's layout and gauging their own skills, Michael's already forming a general idea.

"It looks like there might be an area here in the main chamber where I can get off the ground and set up a sniper position. I'll go ahead and get set up and then when I give the signal, make a lot of noise - maybe a grenade if you've got one - and draw out as many of them as you can before running down here..."

He points to the map, indicating a corridor barely narrow enough for Ellen in her armor and Wolfwood at the same time.

"You filter them down there and start taking them down from the front, I'll pick off the big ones and turtle-guys from above and behind."