Springvale

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

The door that Ellen used to get to Milliways wasn't in Megaton this time. Bringing Annabelle and Demyx had caused enough questions from the people in town. Bringing Mr. Mills through would just have let the flood loose. She opted instead to buy another set of combat armor from Moira, one more appropriately sized for a larger person, and traded her last few caps for extra ammo and supplies. Then she made for the Springvale ruins, found a house with a door still hanging from the frame, and opened it.

The scene that'll greet Bryan Mills is one of old, old ruin. There were houses here once; all that remain are splintery blackened pieces of wall and heaps of rubble. There are cars, rusted-out hulks lurched across the grey, broken remains of the places where roads had been. And there's Ellen, waiting on the other side with that bundle of armor and supplies. "Welcome to Springvale," she says a little nervously. "Thank you."

Comments

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

... okay, Ellen would never in a million years have thought of that. She'll just be over here, watching.

The Talon, for his part, is wide-eyed to a degree that CLAMP would find excessive; there is something about being threatened by a skilled, gun-using cannibal that tends to take one's attention off little things like maimed and mangled joints. He nods rapidly. "Mr. Tenpenny's not going to take that lying down," he mumbles, along with, "I'm just saying. I'm not saying I won't do it. Oh fuck."

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

"Mr. Tenpenny, mm? Thank you." Mills considers knocking the guy out but considering the beasties around here, it probably would severely limit the chances of the message making it back to the intended recipient. He gives them man a wide berth, beckoning Ellen back out of the storm drain.

The AR falls back on its tactical sling as Mills palms a full mag into the .45.

"Grab the guns and let's get moving."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Yessir," says Ellen, scrambling to gather up all the firearms dropped in the area. It occurs to her that the whole thing went down in less than five minutes. That's kind of breathtaking, really.

When she comes back to Mills' side she notes, "I left those mines stacked up by the side of the bridge. Should I plant them again now that we're leaving? Just to keep him from trying to track us after we're out of sight?"

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, Mills is thinking, That took almost five minute. I must be getting old.

"I think that is an excellent idea." His eyes continue to scan the desolate ruins, searching for the next threat. He's flexing his hand again, the wound stiffening up as the tissues swell.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"All right," says Ellen, and jogs forward to start prepping the mines. For now there are no more threats except a few giant cockroaches chittering in the grass. Even the mirelurks in the river show no interest in the goings-on further upstream.

When the last mine is set and she and Mills are across the bridge safely Ellen says, "Are you sure you don't want that stimpak? If you don't, that's fine. I'm just saying I think you kind of saved my skin a couple of times there, so I owe you that much at the very least."

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

He frowns, considering. After the last go round with this wrist getting injured, he's not in a hurry to repeat the one handed shooter exercise. "I think I'll take you up on that. And don't worry about it. I think we're about even."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen nods. Glancing over her shoulder as they pick their way through the ruins, she waits until they're completely out of sight of the Memorial, and even the river. Then she opens up one of the compartments on her backpack and extracts a syringe with a gauge on the top. "My father taught me how to use these," she says. "There's at least one in every first aid kit I've ever seen. They were developed sometime before the War, but we made our own in the Vault after the originals ran out. They'll close up just about any wound pretty quickly, if you make sure the edges are held together for a few minutes after the injection."

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

Mills approves of her selection of a safe position to rest for a moment, and then eyes her hands suspiciously as she removes the stimpak.

He mutely holds out his wounded wrist, looking rather like a little boy for a moment as he waits for her to tend to his injury.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

The stimpak gets set aside for the moment in favor of her bottle of clean water and a small cloth bundle. "Stimpaks work by persuading the body to heal at a much more accelerated rate than normal," she notes, rinsing the wounded area of the wrist off carefully. "They're not magic bullets. In a really bad case, the doctor has to sew up the wound and then apply the stimpak and take the stitches out an hour or two later. They can make really awfully broken bones knit back together in an hour's time if they're applied directly to the vicinity of the break, but it takes a lot out of the patient if they're used that way. All that calcium has to come from somewhere.

The mun has used up all her fandom rationalization on getting the healing goo in the Half-Life games to be plausible. There is no suspension of disbelief available for Fallout. So sorry.

"All right. I'm going to just inject this into the muscle around the site. An intravenous injection would spread the healing chems through your whole body and not do your wrist alone much good," Ellen says. "Now hold still."

She's done this to herself often enough since coming to the surface that it's remarkably easy to use the injection on somebody else while holding their wound shut.

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

Mills watches intently as she washes and cleans the wound. His lips press into a thin line, but that's all the evidence she sees of any pain. It looks like the serrated teeth of the crab's claw cut through skin and muscle, but missed any ligaments or tendons. Thankfully.

When she uncovers the needle, he turns away, closing his eyes. Every muscle in his body goes stock still.

Mills? Afraid of needles? Really?

Her touch is remarkably gentle, he thinks. He focuses on that instead of the cold probing metal and the odd sensation of flesh re-knitting itself.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

The needle in the gauge wavers and drops down to zero; Ellen withdraws the syringe and sets it aside. "All right," she says. "It should be working already. Another few minutes and the whole thing'll be good as new, bar any scarring, of course." She offers a small smile. "Dad was the Vault physician. Until the Overseer assigned him an assistant, I used to have to help him when something needed two sets of hands."

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

"You've got the touch, all right." Mills peers at the rapidly disappearing wound with no small amount of curiosity "Thanks, Ellen. I appreciate it. Here I am, supposed to be taking care of you." He gives her a lopsided grin and chuckles dryly.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Dad always said 'prevention is better than cure'," Ellen says, "and you prevented more than a few wounds today, so I think you win. Do you think we're safe enough here to eat something, or should we keep going first?"

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

Mills makes a little meh sound under his breath. He was just doing what he does.

"I think this looks like a safe enough location. What do you think?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"I'm not hearing anything unusual," Ellen says after a moment, "and I don't see much, and I've got my back to a wall, so I think we should be all right. I've got two days' rations for two people in my pack, here. Did you want one of the ready-meals, or the crispy squirrel bits I got in Megaton?"

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

That gets a bit of a laugh. "Oh what the hell. Hit me with the squirrel bits. And I'm buying us both a huge steak dinner when we get back to the Bar. No buts..."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

It could have been so much worse. Iguana on a stick, for one. Cram, for another. (It's a pink, squishy meat that comes in a blue tin with rounded corners and has a picture on the front that involves a pineapple ring with a cherry on it. You get the general picture.) As it stands Ellen just grins and pulls out the packet of squirrel bits, along with a small tin plate. These she hands over as she notes, "They have steak in Megaton sometimes, but mostly they just use the brahmins for milk and fertilizer. This should be interesting."

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

Mills has eaten iguana. Tasted better than horse. Cram would taste better than horse.

"Brahmins? Are those a special kind of cow?"

He opens the packet of squirrel bits and pops one into his mouth and chews. And chews. And chews. Yeah. Still better than horse.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"I think they're the only kind of cow people have now," Ellen says. The ready-meal looks like a civilian version of an MRE; the horribly faded box proclaims it to contain Salisbury steak and some sort of cherry crisp thing. Ellen starts its built-in heater reaction (chemical packets are a wonderful thing) and sets it back in its box to cook. "They're a lot bigger than the cows in our old science tapes' pictures. And they've got two heads."

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

"Two heads, huh? Radiation or virus mutation?"

He's picked up a bit in passing.

Mmmm, squirrel bits.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"I don't know. I think just radiation. I wouldn't know how to tell the difference- I never had to use the really advanced equipment in the Vault," Ellen admits. Once the packet is done fizzing, she pulls out the tray; then she stops and roots in her bag again. There were a couple of bottles of Nuka-Cola in the last machine she passed, after all.

(The regular kind, not the kind that glows blue and makes night-time trips to the bathroom positively illuminating for a week.)

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

Aw, Mills would have enjoyed the glow in the dark cola.

He mumbles his thanks and pops the cola, taking a long drink and then sighing contentedly. When you're covered in mud and dust and some kind of crab goo, nothing seems more refreshing than a warm cola.

"Kabul is a place in Afghanistan in my world. It's been bombed back to the stone age three or four times in my life time. No nukes, just your average five thousand pound bunker busters. We had to go in after a handful of doctors. Walked in from Peshawar, about a hundred miles. Looked a lot like this place. Well, without the eerie resemblance to the Washington DC of my world."

Mills comes back from his rambling remembrance.

"Hey, do you think you'd want to see what DC looked like before the war?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Mm, tasty tasty strontium... anyway.

Ellen listens thoughtfully, trying to picture the distance. Truth be told she's never had to figure out any human-crossable distance in miles before. Miles in the Vault were numbers for things like math problems, or for how big the entire world was at the equator- vast and terrible abstract numbers even when they were broken down in terms of feet. Nobody's given her any clue how far it actually is from Megaton to anywhere else in terms of miles, just in terms of how long it takes to walk there. So when Mills says 'a hundred miles', for all that she's had the best education the Vault's latest teacher can provide, she still barely grasps it as anything other than 'a really and truly enormous distance'. She shakes her head slowly at the thought; what a journey that must have been...

At the question, though, she sits up a little straighter. "That might be good," she says thoughtfully. "I'd have a better idea of what to expect from the city then. I mean, in terms of layout."

[particularskill.livejournal.com]

"Well, I could take you through to my world, but that'd mean a four hour plane flight out there. We could take a couple of days and explore the city. I bet you'd like the museums."

He wonders idly if Kim would enjoy the museums. That thought gets filed under Dad, You're Such A Stick In The Mud and he sighs, reflexively.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen blinks a few times at that. Eventually she says, "You know... I don't think I've ever seen an actual plane. I mean. Other than the ones in the history texts. And the ones Megaton is built out of, but that's just parts..."