(Untitled)
Scritchity-scratch-scratch creeeeeeeek, goes a door in the Staff and Other Important Areas part of the bar.
A gray and black form slinks out at the creeeeeek noise and darts through the sea of patrons' ankles, tail held high and slobbery paper something-or-other clutched in his jaws. The dog- not quite two feet tall at the shoulder, somewhat ( Read more... )
A gray and black form slinks out at the creeeeeek noise and darts through the sea of patrons' ankles, tail held high and slobbery paper something-or-other clutched in his jaws. The dog- not quite two feet tall at the shoulder, somewhat ( Read more... )
She'd been about to say I have a Geiger counter built into this, but the Pip-Boy's not on her arm any more; the missing weight on her left forearm's a clear reminder of that.
"Anyway, that's why I didn't wind up dead or a ghoul or something the first time. I'm not sure what immediate treatment I got back home from this exposure, since I was unconscious at the time, but it was probably something more recently developed than Rad-Away. Wasn't Moira's treatment, though. Here it's..." She frowns a moment, thinking, and then starts reciting what she remembers seeing on her medical chart. Dr. McCoy keeps good notes and when Ellen gets bored she tends to read anything she can get her hands on. She might not have been trained as a doctor herself but she's at least familiar with the terminology thanks to her dad and his texts.
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"Your arm?" He taps his forearm to mirror the missing device she's referring to. "Were you carrying some sort of -- portable computing device?"
The positioning and the apparent weight she seems to be missing, along with the paleness of her skin, implies that it was something she'd had in her possession for a long period of time.
More details stack up, but that's the most prominent, and along with her casual mention of such devastating radiation.
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She frowns a bit, thinking, before looking up.
"And before you ask, it was a sealed underground fallout shelter big enough to hold up to a thousand people, not a bank vault or a, a, scorpion hole or something."
(She means 'spider hole', but she only heard Gus use the term once, and spiders don't loom large in the Wasteland worldview.)
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"You grew up underground, but not during the actual time of the war. After it, by many years, I'd gather. But you're not living underground now, as is evidenced by the tan lines on face and hands."
His eyes open again, and he fixes her with an amazed look.
"Your world is post nuclear, in the most literal sense, isn't it?"
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"By about two hundred years, yeah," Ellen says. "The Great War happened on October the 23rd, 2077. It's... sometime in December of 2277 now. Maybe later than that, I don't know."
(It hasn't occurred to her yet that it's a little weird to just up and talk about stuff like this with a stranger in the infirmary. A, he might well be someone medical for all she knows- he did ask about the medications, after all, and B, if he tries anything Dogmeat will have his throat. So there's no real reason to think about that kind of thing, right?)
(... look, she's been in the infirmary a while and it's nice to have someone to talk to. Lapses of judgment happen.)
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"Twenty-two seventy-seven. You know, they told me that there were people here from all times and all places, but good heavens, that's -- I'm not quite sure I believed them until this very moment. Sherlock Holmes, by the way, I don't believe we've made our formal introductions."
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Obviously he must be a descendant, named after a particularly honored ancestor. That kind of thing happens, right?
"I don't think we have," says Ellen. "My name is Ellen Park. It's good to meet you, Mr. Holmes. Can I ask when and where you're from?"
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"You said when, but you didn't say where?"
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At this point she's not entirely sure where she does live, since the last time she saw Megaton's walls she was running like hell from Enclave soldiers and she didn't see what became of the place, but... wherever she lives, Vault 101 isn't it.
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"I don't suppose there's much left of the city after a nuclear strike."
Her living arrangements are hardly his concern.
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Two hundred years, and they're still dealing with 'mutants and worse things'. The disaster must have made Chernobyl look like a minor hazardous waste spill.
"More than one Vault. More than one -- tribe for lack of a better term -- creating their own ideal civilisations. Certainly they didn't all survive. Some must have returned to the surface in the first century, others must have eaten themselves alive below ground."
He seems to be musing to himself now. Pulling together a story out of thin air.
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He seems a bit too interested in this, before it's clear that his training about how other people view such things kicks in.
"I mean, that's terrible." Sincere, that's the tone he's going for. "And the resulting research?"
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"One of the Vaults was an experiment in planting mental suggestions as subliminal white noise in the Vault's audio systems. Most of that Vault's population was concert musicians. They were supposed to switch into some kind of soldier trance mode when they suggestions were activated. The off switch didn't really work and the ones who went insane from the programming wound up killing everyone else with their hands and teeth. There was another one where they tried cloning one man fifty-three times, with each clone getting more hostile to non-clones than the last. When they got to fifty-four things went really bad. By the time I found that Vault it was populated by nothing but generations of clones of the same man. It kind of goes downhill from there."
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Such a rich test environment, too.
"And tragic, to say the least. Needless loss of human life."
Yes, that part? Is definitely sincere. He may have strange ideas about some things, but he's not a monster.
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