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“And, that – should do it!” Nora's voice plays over the tinny speakers in Nate's pip-boy.
“You ready for me?” he flirts. She laughs.
He hears a low groaning and then the squeak of metal. She's gotten the intake valve open. He'd thought that thing would have turned into rust after all this time. The vault had to send up their biggest wrenches to pry that sucker loose! Down here, in purification, he and vaultmates had rerouted the flow of water (cleverly, rerouting a few fire water lines and using only three very iffy, old hoses) in order to supply fresh, clean water to the settlement down the hill.
The whole thing was just crazy!
The vault hadn't received any damn messages the whole time they'd been down here. Hell, the radio communication in their pip-boys barely worked. All of sudden, whatever was causing the interference, just stopped. That's when the people up on the surface made contact. The overseer, Uzoma had lit up PA system, dragging every sandy-eyed dweller out of bed and up to mess decks. And, she told them that they were not alone. That a village of survivors had set up practically right on top of them! And, that as soon as the vault got to chattering up a storm, the dwellers had placed a big, red target on their backs. They'd rang the dinner bell for every raider from here to Jamaica Plains.
The mood about the room had taken a downward turn. The weepy masses, at first shocked and delighted that the citizens of Vault-111 were not the last people on earth, had quickly slid into panic. What were they going to do? What could they do? When their great-(great-great-etc.) grandparents had rolled the door shut, they found out that Vault-tec had neglected to supply the vault with firearms. Somehow, Nate didn't think the heavily-armed marauder-armies were going to be impressed with their potato-guns.
I guess they call them, “matos” up there, he thought.
“Hellooo! Nate?”
Whoops.
He spins open his own giant, creaky valve, then a quarter-turn back to prevent the valve disc from getting stuck against the backseat. He mentally checks off that step in the procedure.
“Coming your way, pretty lady!” he says.
He shouldn't – and he knows he shouldn't – knows that she knows, but there's really no way to fix it if it does. Reluctantly, Nate keys his radio.
“Did you –“ he's gets interrupted.
“Nathaniel Hubert Jones, if you ask me a fifth time if I did the quarter-turn back, I swear...” she replies, only a little heated. She leaves off specifying his fate, but Nate smiles down at his pip-boy, properly chided.
“Still not it.” He tells her. She's been trying to guess the rest of his name for weeks, now.
(“Nate? Nate what?” “Just Nate.” “You're trying to tell me your parents named you just, 'Nate'? Wait! Don't tell me! Vault-tec stole your real names and now you all go by numbers instead. Hmm, so would that be, 'Nate-25863' or like, 'N-4-T-3'?”)
“Oh, I know,” she grunts “what your name is.”
He hears squealing metal (and what sounds like a mighty wrench blow) and here comes the sound of rushing water, filling up the tank the settlers had hauled in.
“Whew!” She laughs, panting. “Oh, god. That smells good!”
“I wasn't aware water had a smell.” He chuckles back.
“That,” Nate hears the wrench thud to the ground. “is because you pretty, little mole rats have never had to find it.” He revels in her soft, suggestive tone before getting distracted.
“Are there still mole rats?”