aaaaaaaagh_sky | National Guard Depot

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The door that opens is not, strictly speaking, a door. Ellen wasn't able to find a working one near enough the National Guard building to use, so she had to fall back on the mouth of the drainage pipe that led out of Rock Creek Caverns. "Sorry about the smell," Ellen murmurs, "and the wet feet. This was the best access point I could get us."

Crossposts: http://aaaaaaaagh-sky.livejournal.com/58901.html

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From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

The terminal pings angrily once. Then twice, and Ellen either mutters under her breath or sucks a breath between her teeth. Hard to say, through the helmet's filters. At least there's no third ping; when she settles in to have at the terminal a third time, she finally trips the code correctly, and the magnetic locks disengage. She reaches over her shoulder for the Gauss rifle and waits for the door to slide open....

... and nothing comes out of the musty-smelling darkness on the other side but the smell of earth and damp.

Well, that's... something, at least. Although now she wants to know what in the dickens these people were thinking, to carve a tunnel into the underlying bedrock here without bothering to finish the walls or properly brace the ceiling. She turns to the left and then the right, spilling her helmet's light over-

"Huh. Looks like somebody thought they'd have their own private Vault here," she notes as the light plays over a heap of human bones at the foot of a cabinet full of military manuals. "Guess he was wrong.... at least he had reading material."

She'll include the skeleton in the last rites, once they've stripped all the books and all the energy cells and all the guns and absolutely everything else from the place, but for now it's just one more unfortunate thing in a very unfortunate place. It happens.

From:

luvs_yogurt

Seeking shelter, it's the human way - they probably should have made better considerations before holing up.

"Okay, guys..." he murmurs when his eyes find several small, bomb-shaped rounds. "Are those bombs?"

Not that it'd be the strangest part of his day to find undetonated bombs, but it would rank up there.

From:

ihavemyflaws

Her only real acknowledgment of how anticlimactic this seems is the skeptical arch of her eyebrows.

Michael's question gets her attention, though, and her eyes scan for what prompted it.

"Bringing your bombs into your bunker." She can't help a slight shake of her head. "Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it."

From:

cbucsrule

Gods, this place, this frakking place. Bombs or not -- he's pretty much numbed to all of it by now -- he can't take his eyes off the skeleton.

"Frak of a way to go." All alone, locked up in a small dark space, running out of air? Not his idea of a good time, man, reading material or not. Give him fresh air and green grass and sunshine. He's about ready for a dose of it now. They've been down here a while.

From:

fullofmercy

There are few things more sobering than finding the abandoned body of a fellow human. It happens, occasionally, in the desert: some poor soul lost and wandering and dead of dehydration or exposure, or who'd run into the wrong gang, and the question he always finds himself asking is...do they really find Paradise?

Or are they just dead?

Eternal salvation; how does that work, exactly?

He finds himself mulling over the old questions again, now, as he turns back to the much more present work of going through the guns and books and anything else he can find.

From:

aaaaaaaagh_sky

"Not bombs, exactly." Ellen clanks over to where the things are stacked. "Mini nukes. About the smallest known size you can build a nuclear warhead and get an atomic reaction instead of just a radioactive mess."

She picks up a complicated assembly of pipes and tubes, a little like a big metal cradle and a lot like a large rifle-grip firearm. As she seats it against her shoulder, it becomes obvious that any one of the oval things would fit in that cradle perfectly.

"This is a Fat Man launcher. Doesn't work with anything but mini-nukes. Never used one myself, but I've seen them in action. He must've expected to have to fight his way out."

After a moment's thought, she puts the launcher down again.

"I'll... probably break that down for parts. The Wasteland doesn't need any more of those things on the loose. Let's just gather up everything else and get back to the Bar- I think we're done here."

And nobody needs to stay in this wretched pit any longer than they've already done. She owes them a quick return, at the very least.