RobCo Facility

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

The trek from Megaton to where Moira said the RobCo facility had been took longer than Ellen had expected. She'd started out from Megaton just as soon as the sun came up, the better to make her way south over unfamiliar, uneven ground. Moira had given her a processor widget to install before attempting any downloads; it was nestled snugly in her backpack between two days' worth of rations for two people. No sense taking chances, after all.

The distance hadn't been the big issue, though. The real source of delays, Ellen felt, was the landscape itself. Southwest of Megaton the surface became more and more uneven, rocky and hilly in places, studded with the long-dead remains of multiple trees in others. More than once she had to climb over the fallen rubble that was all that remained of the old elevated roads, only to have to turn around and pick her way across some other area to avoid landing in radioactive ground-water. And if that weren't enough, all of it was anything but empty. More than once she found herself chased by starving wild dogs or harassed by mole rats. In one area, she had to outrun a gang of spike-wearing Raiders, one of whom was armed with a missile launcher. She regretted leaving the sniper rifle home then, to be sure.

Eventually, though, she spotted one of the huge metalwork towers she'd assumed were navigational markers. As she followed its lines to the next tower, and the next, she spotted a hefty-looking grey building up ahead, easily twice the size of Super-Duper Mart. It was surrounded by broken grey stone that might once have all been of one piece, and here and there slender metal posts- possibly lamps of some kind- rose from the ground. The slanting rays of the sun as it crept down the western sky picked out faded red lettering over the door, an R and a couple of O's; she checked her Pip-Boy.

Yep. Looked like the RobCo facility, all right.

Ellen glanced around and started a perimeter sweep, just to be on the safe side. There were no enemies in sight, whether Raiders or Talon Company, save for a black beast somewhat larger than Ellen that turned out to be a giant scorpion, of all things. It was a tough one, too, not giving up the ghost until she'd emptied five or six shotgun shells into it. She eyed it, opted not to bother trying to butcher it (Moira had said she could get good meat butchering any mirelurks she managed to kill, but never said anything about scorptions), and moved on. There was some kind of enormous tower to the south, she noted, possibly the single biggest building she'd ever seen. She'd have to explore it later, if she ever got the chance.

For now the important thing was that there was a bit of chain-link fence up ahead that still had its gate hanging on by rusty, fragile hinges. She opened it and stepped through to Milliways in search of Alyx Vance.

Comments

[vance_prime]

When Alyx wakes up, she doesn't remember where she is. She's already reaching for her gun before she realizes that there are unlikely to be any headcrab zombies or Overwatch soldiers heading in her general direction. Instead, she gets up and peeks her head out of the door to see if anyone else is awake yet.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen's only just arising herself; she's traded in her combat armor for a blue and gold Vault suit, strategically reinforced with armor plates in several key areas. "Oh, you're up," she says with a small smile. "Good morning. Did you sleep all right?"

[vance_prime]

"Well enough."

She rarely sleeps very soundly these days unless she's ready to keel over from exhaustion.

"How about you?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Oh, I'm fine," says Ellen. "Are you hungry? Wadsworth said he had some iguana-on-a-stick if you wanted to eat. We'll go bring the widget to Moira after that. Um, there's a communal washroom for women but it's on the other side of the crater."

[vance_prime]

"I'll wait and wash up when I go back home," says Alyx. "I could eat, though."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Right this way," says Ellen. Not that she has to lead Alyx far, since the 'kitchen' is a tiny room with a bodged-together refrigerator and a small prewar oven, and Wadsworth takes up most of the space. There are, however, two chairs in the open area between the kitchen and the front door, along with a few shelves and lockers. One of the lockers has a faint blue-purple glow coming from around the edge of the doors. "Remind me to ask Moira about that stuff," Ellen says, and, "thank you, Wadsworth," as the robot hands out the roasted, skinned lizards.

[vance_prime]

Alyx takes a tentative nibble, chews thoughtfully, then tears in with gusto.

Beats roasted headcrab for breakfast.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"I think iguana's the first meat I ever had outside of the Vault or Milliways," Ellen says. "And the meat in the Vault was mostly Cram anyway. Around here it's mostly that or squirrel. Brahmin are too valuable to eat, for the most part."

[vance_prime]

"What's a Brahmin?" asks Alyx curiously between bites.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"It's a cow, more or less," says Ellen. "They're a lot bigger than the ones we learned about in class, though. And they've got two heads."

[vance_prime]

"...you're joking."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen holds up one finger, gets up, and heads upstairs. When she returns she's got a reddish-brown hairy bundle under one arm. "This is a Brahmin hide," she says. "I got it from Moira a while ago to keep out drafts and the occasional storm."

She unfolds the hide. It's quite large- big enough to cover a larger bed than the one upstairs- and it has all four legs on. And, yes, both heads.

[vance_prime]

Alyx? Staaaaares.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Weird, isn't it?" Ellen says. "I couldn't stop staring at the first one I saw after I got out of the Vault. That's just not right."

[vance_prime]

Alyx shakes her head rather forcefully, as if trying to jar something loose. "Let's just finish breakfast and go talk to Moira, okay?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Okay," says Ellen, bundling the hide back up and taking it back upstairs. If it comes right down to it, she mostly keeps it in one piece so that she can show it to Milliways people. One skin is worth a thousand botched explanatory attempts about mutant wildlife.

Wadsworth comes around to gather up the sticks and anything else that might have been required once they're done, and offers a bit of (small, hairless, rather soft to the touch) Brahmin hide for the wiping of fingers. Once that's done, they step out into the morning light. "Moira's a little, um... she's kind of interesting," Ellen warns as the door closes behind them. "Just so you know."

[vance_prime]

Alyx barely hears Ellen. She's taking in the sight of Megaton in the daylight.

She's just discovered how the town got its name.

.

.

.

"Ellen?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Hm?"

[vance_prime]

"At what point were you planning to tell me that THERE IS A FUCKING NUCLEAR WARHEAD SITTING IN THE MIDDLE OF TOWN?!"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"When we started down towards it, actually," says Ellen. "It's no threat to anyone who stays out of direct proximity any more, though. I disarmed it- you couldn't even set it off with a directly applied fusion pulse charge any more."

[vance_prime]

"You dis--" Alyx boggles even harder. "How long has this town been here, again? And nobody tried to neutralize the damn thing?? Fuck, why is the town even HERE?! You don't build a city around an unexploded nuke, you put up a big fucking sign that says 'WARNING, UNEXPLODED BOMB, GO ANYWHERE BUT HERE'!"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

There are a number of other Megaton settlers in the area. A few of them have stopped to eye the flailing newcomer. Ellen, for her part, coughs and steeples her fingers. "Well," she says, "Marya- she's the oldest person in town- says the original founders were people who were trying to get into Vault 101, but got turned away or otherwise couldn't get in. The crater was the most defensible spot when raiders came. And there's the other thing."

She turns and points across the crater at a ramshackle building (although all of them fit that description, pretty much) about halfway up the crater proper. It has several yellow-and-black radiation signs on the front and a large, vaguely planet-looking sphere with orbital streaks around it mounted on the roof.

"See that?" she says. "That's the Church of the Children of Atom. They were a huge part of the workforce that founded the town. The other settlers wouldn't have been able to pull anything at all together without them. And, well, they worship the bomb." She lowers her voice and adds, "They'd consider what I did gross sacrilege. They're crazy, of course, but they kind of outnumber me by a lot, so I do my best to keep quiet."

[vance_prime]

.

.

.

"Ellen, I mean this in the kindest possible way, but is everyone in your world certifiably insane?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Sheriff Simms is all right," says Ellen after some thought. "And Gob, the bartender at Moriarty's, even if he is a ghoul..."

She'd cite her father at this point, but Dad did sort of leave her a note to the effect of 'stay in the Vault and you'll be safe' which she discovered while she was, y'know, on the run from Security trying to kill her. So Dad might not really qualify.

[vance_prime]

It's really disturbing how long it took Ellen to answer that question.

"He's a what?"