The Trail

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

The door opens, as it often does, on a patch of scrub desert under a cloud-studded sky. Peering eastward, you can make out the shape of a shattered, once-elevated highway in the light of the just-risen sun, and perhaps the jagged edges of the tallest parts of the Megaton city walls. The air is a little cooler than it's been on past visits, and here and there the brown and yellow scrub that characterizes Wasteland vegetation seems to be sharing space with hazes of green.

There's also kind of an overwhelming stink of cow, because Ellen left Megaton astride Shiphrah and Puah and the Brahmin is busily chewing its cud with one head nearby. Ellen pats the other head briefly with one stealth-suited hand as she says, "We're not far from the caravan route where the raiders ambushed our water men. This is the nearest door I could find."

Comments

[aeons_crackshot]

"Good cover too, so long as you don't mind the possibility of a stray shot making your cover explode."

"If they're smart enough to stage stuff like this, they may be smart enough to realize he's worth more dead than alive," Annabelle agrees.

"Might be a good idea to circle around the ambush site, they may have gotten careless when they started dragging off the loot."

Footprints, drag marks, blood...all kinds of things can easily be left behind by the careless.

[boston_bruiser]

Voodoo grunts a noncommittal grunt as he walks around the wreck, watching every step. "No signs of explosives. These guys might've been smart, but they weren't trained."

He steps down into the gully and walks along it, looking along the bottom. A brass shell casing glints in the sunlight, and he bends to pick it up, rotating it in his fingers before holding it up for the others to see.

"Five-five-six," he says. "Looks clean, too. Almost new. These guys were squared-away with their ammunition."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"They probably got Harith, then," Ellen says with a resigned sigh. "Which means we'd better pick this up quickly. I always did like Harith."

The troll-made goggles look more than a little ridiculous, especially given that she's dressed in the Chinese stealth suit with the headpiece pulled down, but Ellen doesn't particularly care. When you own an object that allows you to see scent information, its looks are entirely secondary.

"They spent a pretty long time here, if the level of smell concentration is anything to go by," she says after a bit. "I wonder how many minor traders they might've gone after before they got bold enough to hit the water caravan... the more concentrated end of the scent trail is out the southern end of the gully, so I'm guessing that's the way they came in. They scattered when we started getting the upper hand."

[aeons_crackshot]

Annabelle has been looking too. She nods in agreement at what Ellen's picked up via sent. "Brush suggests people were standing there a while, not much in the way of prints, though. Ground's too dry."

She moves on, circling from the northern end of the gully. "Found a couple of couple of shell casings and some blood. Walking wounded, maybe?"

[boston_bruiser]

Voodoo shakes his head. "If the Brotherhood winged one of them, they're either dead or long gone by now. Wildlife'd take care of any stragglers. What do the goggles say, Ellen?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen turns and heads over to Annabelle's position, scanning the ground rapidly, then lifting her gaze to a further distance. "There's an erratic trail heading off away from the others," she reports. "Probably the wounded one. It's as old as the rest- whoever they were, they didn't stick around. The others look like they start veering towards the same direction as the southern trails..."

[masterofgunfu]

Andrea's still feeling her way in this group so while everyone's been checking things over, she's been keeping watch; pacing around and trying to parse through the scents left behind. She tries her best to determine how many likely raiders there were and their health though with scents this old she doesn't hold much hope.

[boston_bruiser]

Voodoo thinks on this for a half-second.

"Dude's probably bug food by now. Even if he ain't, he can't help us. I say we follow the main trail and stick to the high ground where we can."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen nods. "If it were more recent I'd try to track him down and question him, but... this isn't a good place to be wounded." She looks to Andrea. "Have you got anything? The trails I'm seeing overlap each other so much it's hard to make out much other than 'a lot of humans'."

[masterofgunfu]

"This old, the scents are commingled pretty badly," Andrea says musing then she holds here mouth open and breaths in some more. "Still I think I can pick out maybe seven or eight bodies, maybe more. They were nice and didn't bath too often so their scents are pretty unique. I think our wounded guy is another nonbather. Getting a strong chem smell too. Are their any old plants around here?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Not on the scale of Takoma Industrial or the Nuka-Cola plant," Ellen says, "but there were a few places west of here that used to be garages and vehicle maintenance shops. Those kinds of buildings were pretty ideal for manufacturing chems- I ran into a ghoul once who was using an old Metro station to make a new version of Jet."

[masterofgunfu]

Andrea takes another deep breath and shakes her head.

"You guys have problems with drugs here? Cause this kind of reminds me of some of the street drugs I see manufactured back home. Not exactly but it's closer to it than cleaning chemicals. They also are in pretty good health, or were."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"That's what Jet is," Ellen says. "It's a stimulant, a nasty one. It's pretty popular with the violent and murdering types, too. Murphy, that ghoul I mentioned, was making an amped-up version using pre-War sugar cereal." She wrinkles her nose. "There's also Psycho, which was meant to make soldiers faster and more dangerous during the Resource Wars. People use that to get high these days. And Buffout is basically oral steroids that tend to induce psychotic berserker rages. It's pretty popular with raider types. Med-X you don't see so much in the field, though. That's synthetic opioid painkiller, so that's more the kind of thing people use back at base. It wouldn't surprise me at all if these guys had been using Jet before we ran across them."

[masterofgunfu]

"Oh this just sounds like oodles of fun," Andrea dead pans. "Let me see this blood."

She walks over and crouches down to pick up some of the blooded dirt and gives it a good smell as well.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

The thing about Buffout is that when you get it down your throat, it tends to induce a number of body reactions that mimic healing, at least temporarily. Mostly in the 'hey, I'm not bleeding any more' vein- so to speak. People who haven't got stimpaks to genuinely induce the healing process will sometimes chorf the stuff down to get away from an unwelcome combat situation even if they're not looking for a good old fashioned 'roid rage.

So, yeah; what do metabolized steroids smell like a day or two after the fact? This, pretty much.

[masterofgunfu]

And see the funny thing about the Lyc-V virus is it is very territorial and jealous. It reacts to things that can harm the host and so when Andrea smells the strong chemical, her beast self perks up it's ears despite the lack of magic in this world.

For herself, Andrea coughs and says, "Ya, if they use drugs, that was a Raider," as she stands.

[aeons_crackshot]

"I've dealt with more than my fair share of folks strung out on something or other. Definitely not fun."

Drugs + Mad Science = Bad News. "On the plus side, them not being able to feel it don't matter much when you jelly most of their brain."

[boston_bruiser]

"So we got twelve bad dudes with assault rifles, most headed south, all hopped up on drugs, and more'n likely holding a local gunsmith hostage."

He stands up, brushes off his fatigues.

"We better fuckin' haul ass before one of 'em dopes up and puts two through his fuckin' brainpan."

He peers south, squinting despite himself at the low rolling hills.

"We should be good if we hug the scent trail. Not a lot of cover, but long sight lines, so 'less someone up in that fuckin' tower takes a shot," he says, pointing to Tenpenny Tower, "we'd be on equal terms with any shithead who wants to take us."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"They'd better not. The robot factory and the wind farm are between us and Tenpenny Tower," Ellen says. "If anyone in the tower tries to attack us I'm telling you now, I'm going off course to let Paladin Rama know."

Then she straightens up and dusts off her hands.

"Let's get moving. We've been here long enough that I'm a little surprised we haven't had a visit from one of the giant scorpions."

[aeons_crackshot]

"Good point. I don't want to waste ammo on killing those things if I don't have to."

Waste not, want not and all that jazz.

Down the trail Annabelle goes, although Ellen's in front since she has the best idea of where they're headed.

[boston_bruiser]

Voodoo's a little in front and a little to the right, uncomfortable with the four of them being in any sort of orderly line. There's movement in the corner of his eye, and he snaps his head around just in time to see a scorpion the size of a Toyota skitter over a nearby hill.

Just another day in the Wastes.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen's cow is meandering along at a moderate distance from the humans, not seeming particularly upset boy the scorpion; it's far enough away not to be a problem, and anyway Ellen made a point of getting Brahmin-suitable armor from Sameth some time ago. It goes a long way.

Ellen herself is busy scanning the ground in the distance intently, looking for signs of where various split-off trails might go. It was easier chasing Dave's kidnappers down. They were all headed to exactly the same place, and as far as she could tell they were pretty sober. These people don't seem to have been able to walk a straight line for more than a few yards; she really, really hopes Andrea's senses are capable of making up for that fact, or that Annabelle's experiences with more skilled human trackers let her get an idea of what to look for.

[aeons_crackshot]

Annabelle can help keep Ellen on track, sure.

Pointing out brush damaged here or scuffs in the dirt there that indicate where the scattering humans went.

"Bah. Looks like they scattered like frightened birds, the bastards."

[boston_bruiser]

Voodoo shrugs, one-shouldered and quick.

"If I was a raider and you put a dozen guys in power armor on my ass, I'd scatter, too."

He leaves the tracking to the others. Someone's gotta pull security while they're doing that.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

They keep moving.

It's a big Wasteland, and there's a lot of things in it. Most of them are either harmless or sensible enough to find somewhere else to be when the humans turn up in their line of sight. Radroaches can't always be bothered to leap up at passers-by, after all, and it's not as if there's much need for bloatflies the size of rabbits to assault everything that moves. They've fed enough lately, after all.

But a sharp eye that happens to be pointed in the right direction might notice that up ahead, across the remains of a road where the terrain starts to turn rocky, there's something moving that's a little too dark for shadows and a little too small for a yao guai.