Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

2296

The sun outside is the merciless eye of God. The Cave is quite the opposite. That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above. The Cave is an endless structure that rests outside the settlement of Merini. An island in the vast wasteland. Before the war, Merini was a small town located next to a dam. Bombs dropped and the dam broke, flooding the town and turning only the buildings on the hills into what would become Merini. Merini was also home to The Cave. A vast structure that alternated between being an actual cave to sections of pre-war tech. It’d been used for everything from a chem stash house to shelter from the sun. 

Laois’s Company were prospectors. Plunging into the depths in search of pre-war tech since the irradiated lake was too vast to dive in. However, the cave was not without its risks. 

Laois was at the head of the company. He had a steel bastard sword thrust forward rather heroically despite himself. The tunnel was lit up only by his and his sister’s Pip-Boy flashlights, showing off the fanned-out party. Namari had her railgun trained on the beast before them. Shuro raised his sword aloft, while Chilchuck brought up the rear, watching the Alpha Deathclaw advance down the tunnel. Marcille and Falin were on opposite sides of Laois, each armed with Laser Rifles, ready to cut down the irradiated horrorshow that rushed at them.

“Hit it with everything you’ve got!” shouted Laois as the party started to swarm the creature. 

The violence was somehow both quick and mad, but sluggish. Namari approached to get a better shot at the creature, but with a backhand, it knocked her into a wall. The force of the swat caused her to drop her gun. 

“Contact!” shouted Chilchuck. 

Laois saw it and internally he sighed. The rumble in his stomach told him exactly what was wrong with their performance, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He activated VATS and he found himself swinging rapidly at the monster’s leg. Shuro did the same, but both men found that their slashes lacked proper weight. The muscles in their arms strained and screamed for release from combat. 

The deathclaw kicked out, knocking Laois and Shuro away. Their armor rattled against stone walls and Laios felt the stalagmight he hit shatter. He thanked god that it wasn’t his spine. It was then that he saw it. Marcille and Falin had been separated and his sister stood at the foot of the beast. Her laser rifle, Ambrosia cast a beam of white, hot light right up at the deathclaw’s horned head, and the cutting beam did little more than piss it off. 

The beast dived down and grabbed her in its jaw with a crunch that was loud enough to be heard in the dungeon. 

Three voices in the cave called out, “Falin!” 

Laois, Marcille, and the rattled Shuro rushed the creature that had Falin. She was tangling from its mouth by her arm. Pain like lightning shot up her limb. She knew that she wasn’t going to be able to help anyone. She dug around in her shoulder bag and pulled out a pair of heavily modified grenades. They wouldn’t hurt the monster, she knew that. She looked down at her brother and her ghoul lover and tossed down as many grenades as she could at the party. 

Before the tired company could react, their bodies were engulfed in blue light and the light of Falin’s Pip-Boy vanished along with the cave.

Laois woke up in a small patch of Tatos with a farmer smashing a hoe against the chest plate of his armour. His Pip-Boy produced static and then caught the signal of a radio station playing a Skeeter Davis Song. 

“Don’t they know? It’s the end of the world…” sang the long dead voice of Skeeter Davis.

“Get the hell out of my field, you goddamn freak!” shouted the farmer as Laois quickly fled away from the scene. He spotted Marcille and Chilchuck standing in a patch of sandy grass a little ways away. Marcille was rubbing her forehead and Chilchuck was looking up at the sky. 

“What happened?” He asked.

“Relay Grenades. Normally those only work in the opposite direction,” said Chilchuck. 

“It’s more than just that, we were off our game…It’s the food, wasn’t it? It’s because we lost the rations,” said Laios. 

“Most likely, yeah,” said Marcille. Her voice was distant as she imagined Falin being ripped apart by a giant irradiated lizard monster. 

“We have to get back down there. If anything…We need to see if she teleported anywhere…or at least to recover her body,” said Laios. “Where are Shuro and Namari?”

“Oh? They left,” said Chilchuck. 

“What?” asked Laios. 

“Yeah, you were kind of out for a minute so we let you lie in the Tato patch,” said Chilchuck. “Namari said she’d been planning on taking up with another prospector group a while ago…And I think Shuro’s a little out of it because of the Falin situation.”

“And on top of it,” said Marcille, still staring off into the middle distance. “We lost most of our equipment when we were teleported away.”

Laois cast his eyes back towards The Cave’s entrance and then back to his two friends, “If we sell our equipment and downgrade, could we get enough caps to get more people to go down there to recover Falin?”

“Not even close,” said Chilchuck. 

The trio began walking back into town while Laios mind danced with hypotheticals about how they could get back down into the cave to get Falin’s body back. Marcille gripped her stomach and felt the gentle rumble of hunger.

“I know we’re light on caps,” she said. “But we do need to eat something. We got whipped by that deathclaw because we didn’t eat.”

She considered some places in town, “There Nita, the Assaultron that makes that delicious Cram Musubi. Or Dessas, they sell Caravan Lunches on the cheap, we could take those down.”

“No,” said Laios. “We need to go back into the cave now.”

“But if we go now…” started Marcille, but Laios interjected.

“I have an idea,” he said. His expression was grim. “You two, leave the company. I can take your equipment and sell it for food and equipment, go down there and bring back Falin’s body.”

“Absolutely not,” said Marcille. “That’s reckless.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed, dummy,” said Chilchuck.

“It’s not an impossible feat,” said Laios. “If I go down by myself, it will be easier to avoid monsters. I can get what I can of my sister back and come back here to bury her..and I wouldn’t feel right dragging the both of you back down with me.”

“Absurd,” said Marcille. “I cared about her as much as you, Laios. I’ll be fucked before I let you go at this at this alone.”

“Don’t forget about me,” said Chilchuck, a devil may care to put a smile on his face. “Both of you won’t stand a chance without an expert lockpick. And that’s before some shotgun or landmine trap takes you.”

Laios smiled, but then his expression became grave and a dark aura seemed to rise about his person as he brought his hands to rest on his companions' shoulders, “You two sure you’ll come with me? No matter what it takes?”

“I…yes? Laios, you’re scaring me more than usual,” said Marcille.

They stood at The Edge. The little shopping area is right outside of the mouth of the cave. It wasn’t called that because of it existing at the physical edge of the cave. But more out of the island’s mayor having a cryptic fixation on the pre-war act of edging. 

“We will have to be entirely self-sufficient,” said Laios. “Whatever irradiated monsters are down there will serve as our meals until we leave with Falin’s corpse.”

Marcille and Chilchuck looked terrified by the prospect. The kind of terror etched on their faces was the kind that communicated, “What the fuck is your problem?”

“It stands to reason,” Began Laios, ignorant to the obvious revulsion written on the faces of his friends. “That if there’s an active breeding population of carnivorous monsters like deathclaws in the cave, then it stands to reason that there are also populations of herbivorous animals within. It’s an entire ecosystem sustaining itself within. So, if we go down there we can sustain ourselves off of that rather than scavenging pre-war junk food or processed food from the Commonwealth.”

Marcille looked up and away at the mention of Pre-war junk food, “That’s insane. Only solo survivalists in the scrublands and weird traditionalists bother with the nightmare shit that lives down here.”

“Just think Marcille, haven’t you seen a monster on our adventures that looks kind of tasty?” he said, imagining himself taking a mirelurk in a giant steam cooker. “Besides, there are plenty of rational, normal people who hunt monstrous animals for sport and food.”

Marcille and Chilchuck’s minds were flooded with images of tunnelers, ferals and mole rats. None of which, particularly the feral ghouls sounded appetising in the slightest. 

“They end up with food poisoning or getting infected with radioactive intestinal worms, Laios,” said Marcille.

“You said you cared just as much about Falin as I do, this is what we have to do if we want to get back to her corpse quickly,” said Laios.

Laios's path took them into the cave into the first level. They saw a group of children running away from a bark scorpion. None of the group seemed particularly bothered about the green arachnid roughly the size of a pre-war terrier. 

Marcille took the initiative, though. She seized her rifle and brought it down on the back of the bark scorpion hard, shaping the monster’s carapace.

“Honestly, they need to put up a fence or something or some kid’s going to die ,” said Chilchuck.

Laios picked up the scorpion by its tail and smiled at his friends while gesturing with its body.

Marcille’s face scrunched up (moreso), “No, absolutely not.” 

“I’ve heard of people who eat the poison glands,” said Laios. 

“But…But they’re poison, Laios…You’re depraved,” said Marcille. 

---

They set up a small fire pit and found a pot in the garbage. After washing it out, Laios filled it with water and cut the tail off the scorpion. Cutting off its tail and placing it into the boiling water. 

Chilchuck and Marcille watched Laios as he boiled the water and the tail therein. They were waiting to lose another friend when he pulled the tail and cracked open the poisonous barb’s exoskeleton to get at that meat. 

 He ripped out the stringy red veined meat with his teeth and swallowed. His throat seized and Chilchuck and Marcille made a move to his side, expecting him to die. Laios turned away from his friends, doubled over and immediately vomited it back up. 

A pair of boots stood before him and Laios looked up. Gazing down upon him was a pair of wide eyes peering from beneath the bill of a helmet. The figure’s face was hidden behind a truly glorious beard. God?

“Hold it right there,” said the diminutive man. His wide eyes went over to the rudimentary fire that they’d set up and he studied it for a moment, “Radscorpion hot-pot, I can’t say I share your methods, but you do what you can, I guess.”

“Who are you?” asked Marcille who was promptly ignored by the little man as he stepped past her and over to the book pot. 

He had on his back a gigantic, homemade wok that looked better than any other homemade cooking implements that Marcille had seen in her years wandering the wasteland. It almost looked Pre-War. The man discarded their smaller pot and examined the body of the radscorpion that she’d killed.

“When you cook a radscorpion,  the common idea is to remove the pincers and the tail. The tail’s useless for food. I’ve heard of some people who make it into casseroles, but it’s too difficult to make on its own using the venom,” he said. 

Laios stood and wiped throw up off of his lips, “The book said something like that, so I figured it was alright to eat like that.” 

“That’s where you’re wrong young man…If it were a bigger rad scorpion, you could probably make a few radscorpion steaks, but I don’t think there’s enough here for the three of you,” He said. 

He then took a cutting board out of his bag and began to trim the Pincers and the remains of the tail off of the corpse before cracking open the shell. “You’ll want to peel out the innard and discard them. They’re often lousy with parasites.” 

Laios watched the man work with wide-eyed fascination. Marcille looked on with an expression of horror as the little man cut the arachnid’s inside meat into sections before peeling out and discarding its innards into the dirt. 

The man’s wide eyes narrowed and he dug around in his bag and produced a bag of Radaway, a jar of some kind of light green dehydrated mushrooms that were flecked with some light blue slivers of something. 

“The scorpion by itself is bland, but I’ve found if you pair it with Radaway and some of this brain fungus mixture that I’ve concocted, it adds a floral note to the meal,” said the man. “Plus the Radaway cuts down on the radioactivity of the meat.”

“This isn’t happening,” said Marcille. “First, it’s a bit too late for Radaway to do anything for me. Second, you’re a stranger suggesting we mix random mushrooms and medicine into a soup.”

“I’ve nearly a decade of living in the tunnels of the cave,” explained the little man without a hint of anger in his voice. “In that entire time, I’ve studied the gastronomic uses of the food within. As you can probably see, I’ve been able to make it without being killed or ghoulfied.”

Marcille shot him an irritated expression at that final comment. The man placed his pot on the fire and filled it with a few cans of water before emptying the meat and various vegetables into it, completely ignoring Marcille’s protests about his methods.

An idea occurred to Laios, but he waited as the food was being dished out into tin mugs and bowls before he could put it into action. Even Marcille ate it, reluctantly digging into the tender,semi-sweet meat of the scorpion.

Radscorpion Hotpot

1 Radscorpion

1 bag of Radaway

2 hefty spoonfuls of Brain Fungus Lavender Blend

3-4 cans of water.

Serves 3-4

+2 INT

+ 125 Hit Points

- 10 RAD

+15 Energy Resistance for 10 Minutes

“My name’s Senshi, by the way,” he said as he ate his meal. “It means Seeker back where I’m from.”

“I’m Laois, our medic is Marcille the ghoul,” said Laois, gesturing with his head at his friends. “And Chilchuck, our synthetic burglar.” 

“Lovely to meet the lot of you,” said Senshi. “I spotted all of you arguing earlier about going down into the cave and eating the wildlife. What can you tell me about your motives?” 

“My sister probably got murdered by a Deathclaw and we want to go down there to kill it and get her body back,” said Laios. “We were in one of the deeper sections of the cave when it happened.”

“A Deathclaw,” said Senshi, bemused. “I’ve never had the chance to take one of those down myself. If it’s in the deepest parts of the cave, it should be getting sluggish. Most reptiles can’t tolerate the cold down there. I’ve never had the opportunity to take one down myself…Naturally, I think I have to join you.”

“We’d love to have you, right guys?” Laios asked, turning to Chilchuck and Marcille. 

Marcille had a chunk of meat hanging out of her mouth when she slurped it up, apprehensively nodding. She was joined by Chilchuck not long after. 

“I think it wouldn’t hurt things,” said Chilchuck as he sipped the hearty broth. He could feel the energy-resistance tendencies of the soup taking hold. 

Senshi smiled and when the group was finished, they packed up the cooking equipment and made for the cave. Senshi began to wonder out loud, “When we kill the creature, what should we do with it? I’m thinking hamburgers. Deathclaw Hamburgers…If it has eggs we could probably  make a day out of deathclaw sunrise burgers…or Meatloaf.”

The realization of what it would mean to eat a monster that ate Falin didn’t quite click with the trio. But all thought of it. They just simply refused to let the connective tissue of these two ideas to meet in their skulls. 

This was wasteland food, the motto of the wasteland is often the idea of the unchanging nature of war. But in the depths of the cave, the motto is different. It’s eat or be eaten, traveller. Eating is a privilege for those who live, boyo.

Chapter Text

Laios 

Level: 5

S - 7                                                       

P - 6

E - 6

C - 3

I - 8

A - 6

L - 4

Perks: Daddy’s Boy, Little Leaguer, Entomologist, Swift Learner, Lead Belly.

Tagged Skills: Melee Weapons, Science, Medicine

Explanation: Daddy's boy because he's more like his father than he cares to admit. Little Leaguer for enhanced use of melee weapons, Swift Learner because he's steadily learning from Senshi. Lead Belly, self-explanatory, eating radioactive monsters will do that to you. Entomologist because he knows how to kill the things that he loves .

---

The second length of tunnel deep within the depths of the cave was for a time a part of some kind of hydroponics laboratory. Some geniuses from the East Coast thought they could grow plants down here, but gradually things became overgrown and the seeds they brought were tainted by being mixed with junk seeds from vaults that had been pocketed and traded all around the vast wasteland. That left a near-endless corridor of sprawling white tiled floors and steel walls. All of which were gradually being consumed by vines and mutated ferns. 

“I always wondered about this section,” said Chilchuck. “It’s been like this for a few years now, but the power to the overhead lamps and the generator running it haven’t gone out. 

“I like to think that the plants are doing it,” said Laios. “I think on some small level, they know that the lights are necessary for their continued survival, plus it doesn’t hurt that the greenhouse effect in the lab keeps the moisture recycled.” 

“Part of me worries that one day, the lights will go out, plunging the entire section into darkness and killing the plants,” said Senshi. 

Marcille, was by contrast not enjoying the greenhouse effect of the section. The condensation from the recycled moisture and the heat from the lamps made her feel like a mirelurk hunter being boiled alive by a gang of wastelanders lucky enough to catch one. Her body tottered and stumbled forward onto her knees.

Laios looked over and rushed to her side, “Marcille, what’s happened?” 

“This heat is unbearable and I’m tired, Laios,” she said, her voice barely above her typical whine.

“We’ve been walking for a while now, we all deserve some rest,” he said. “Everyone’s tired…If we’re where I think we are, the old scientist quarters should be around here, we could put down sleeping bags for the night, I slept there during my first solo trip into the cave. It was back when you could still find discarded magazines and there was even a mattress there. I think all that’s long gone now.” 

He drew his sword and started to cut through some of the vines as they cleared a path for the door. 

(Everyone Liked That)

When they reached it, the room was as Laios had described it. High-roofed, opening up to a rudimentary chimney at the top, a floor that was now covered in trash, ranging from discarded soda bottles to empty boxes of pre-war junk food. 

The room was of anything that made it once resemble a place where people slept, dined, and loved together. Maybe it could be like that again. Perhaps it could be again. Perhaps if they liberated themselves from societal norms, the party could tag team Senshi, and then, and only then this room would be a place where people loved together…But alas, this isn’t that sort of tale, dear reader. Besides, Marcille lacked the fascination with the short, stocky man that her male companions did. 

Laios smiled idly to himself, “I burnt myself trying to make Mac n Cheese with Cram and Hot sauce…mmm…But it was still pretty good.”

Blamco Mac n Cheese With Cram.

1 Box Blamco Macaroni and Cheese

1 Can of Cram

2 cans of water

1 packet of Rita’s Hot Sauce (pineapple).

+ 7 Radiation

- 10 hunger

Pros: High Protein Content

Cons: The Protein comes from 100-year-old processed meat product. 

“ Nothing says dinner like Blamco,” said Marcille, her mind drifting to an advertisement she’d seen of it on the side of a building somewhere in her childhood. Her stomach growled and she hated that she was already hungry.

“Hungry?” asked Chilchuck.

“There’s still some of the radscorpion if you want,” offered Senshi, a true king among men.

“I don’t,” said the ghoul. 

“Oh yeah,” said Laios. “Let's see what’s native to this section, we can hunt it down and cook up something new!” 

Laios has enthusiasm and a lust for life that few can ever hope to have. Many envy him for this. Many more hate him for this, though they know not why. Marcille hung her head.

“Marcille? Do you not want to eat?” he asked, not sure why his friend was upset. “If you want us to make you something special, I’m sure we can try.”

“It’s not a matter of…It’s not about what I want…at least not like that, It’s more…It’s going to be one of the fucked up monsters that live down here, isn’t it?” she said.

Laios’ mouth went into a flat semi-smile that said, “ Yeah, sorry bro, it’s going to be a monster. ” 

Marcille, who can read expressions sighed, “Alright, I’ll eat whatever’s edible.”

Laois’ soul danced. Somewhere birds were singing, sunflowers were blooming, and somewhere still mothers were crying. However, that last part had little to do with Laios’ good mood. Such is the nature of the wasteland. The young man flipped open his handy Wasteland Survival Guide before flipping through to the local section on the Merini Cave. 

“What kind of creatures live around here?” asked Chilchuck

“On this section, it says are molerats, regular rats, bats, a lot of things like that,” he said as he listed other things that rhymed. 

“I’m not eating anything unhygienic!” shouted Marcille.

“Spore Carriers?” offered Laios.

“I’m not eating something that used to be a person, Laios, that’s cannibalism and it’s out of the question,” she said firmly.

“SENTRY Armor,” offered Laios.

“There’s nothing to it, it’s just Power Armor with a messed up AI,” she said.

“There’s always Spore Plants,” said Senshi. “Their fruits can be used to make a thin red paste and fruity soups.”

“Are there any more normal plants? Surely the scientists who used to live here were growing fruits and vegetables, right?” she asked.

Chilchuck fixed the ghoul with a half-lidded stare of disappointment, “Oh, so you’re one of those. The type that says ‘anything is fine by me’ but after a moment none of the suggestions brought her way are fine.”

“Is what I’m saying that selfish!?” shouted Marcille.

“If the shoe fits,” the short synth replied.

“Actually,” began Senshi as he walked between Chilchuck and Marcille. “There are some plants around here that are bursting with fruit at this time of the year.”

“What, really?” she asked.

Senshi replied and gave her a thumbs-up of fatherly acknowledgment.

They walked out of the room and over to another section of the lab space, where in a corner rested a handful of fang-bearing mutant venus fly traps that seemed to be hyperventilating. Thankfully, the plants hadn’t noticed them yet. 

“I fucking knew it!” shouted Marcille. “I knew that you were talking about man-eating plants!” 

“That’s where you’re wrong, Marcille,” began Laios. “Spore Plants, or Dionaea Muscipula are not man-eaters as we might usually think. Human beings are too large for them to consume. They typically eat rodents and squirrels. People have reported that humans have been eaten by them or that they have preferences for different types of human meat, but that’s a misconception. When they attack a person with a seed blast that’s strong enough to kill them, it effectively renders the person’s body into a mound of fertilizer for their seeds.”

 “Their fruits can be used to make a thin red paste and fruity soups,” said Senshi.

If Laios saw Senshi as God, Marcille saw him as The Devil. His place in this broken land was to punish her with culinary horrors. She thought about it for a moment, Spore Plant seeds are kind of like a normal fruit. Plus the monster itself was kind of a wimpy bitch, she’d watched Falin smash a claw hammer into one and it toppled like nothing. 

Marcille drew up her laser rifle and began to take, aim. Only for Senshi to dive at her.

“Stop you fool!” he shouted. 

A Spore Plant that she hadn’t noticed blasted her in the face with its green seed mixture and her rifle went off, blasting a line of energy through the room, that briefly lit things up…and alerted the other Spore Plants to their presence. 

“Dammit!” shouted Chilchuck. 

The group retreated to the walls and crouched down, waiting for th plants to believe that they had left. 

“How are we supposed to eat the fruit if you accidentally incinerate the plant with your lasers, ghoul?” asked Senshi.

“Forgive me for trying to get things done quickly,” said Marcille.

“You are forgiven,” said Senshi, ignorant of the sarcasm in her voice. “Besides, we don’t want to cull the entire population of the plants if we don’t want others to deal with the mutated rats here.” 

“I feel like I’d rather deal with the rats instead of the plants,” said Marcille.

“To each their own,” said Senshi. “I guess you’re just more comfortable shooting things that sit in one spot, I suppose.”

Marcille growled, “Okay, then what do you suggest we do?” 

“We three go in,” said Senshi. “And with swords hack at three of the plants and bring them back here. The boy can remain outside.”

“ The boy? ” asked Chilchuck.

(Chilchuck Hated That)

Marcille nodded, though it did nothing to shake her apprehension over the situation. She drew a hunting knife out of her bag and crouched down with Laios and Senshi before venturing back into the room with all the docile. 

She didn’t like how quiet the room had become. Absent the beating of her own heart in her withered ears there was the gentle creek of the unaware Spore Plants. Good, she was alright as long as they weren’t hissing or spitting goop at her.  

Laios and Senshi went to separate plants, each with one swift cut brought down the plants without alerting the others and began to collect their fruits. That left her. She drew her knife and went for the plant. Before she could make her cut the plant was looking down at her.

“Oh shit!” The plant’s maw had seized her by the head and began to thrash her body around. 

Marcille’s long legs were kicking around wildly, trying to either find purchase on a wall or pummel the thing with her boots. How did Falin make this look so easy? The pressure that the plant put on her skull was immense, threatening to crush her head. This was it, this was the end. This was her going into the long goodbye. She’d be with Falin soon. 

Laios cut across the room and with one sharp motion cut the neck of the Spore Plant, sending its severed head and his friend crashing to the ground. Marcille pried the severed head of the plant off of her own and stared up at the ceiling. Death was so close and her face was covered in the horrible green slime that was the plant’s semi-acidic nectar.

Laios grabbed her hand and hefted her up, dragging her and Senshi out of the room with their spoils of conflict before slamming the door shut before the other plants could mount a defense against their invaders. 

The walk back to the room that they’d held up in was likewise uneventful. Though, Laios sought to stop that.

“So, what does the nectar taste like?” he asked Marcille.

“Beg pardon?” she asked.

“The nectar, from the mouth of the spore plant. I always imagined it tastes like honey, but it smells floral, almost,” he said.

Marcille fixed him with a look, unwilling to lick the ominous liquid off of her lips, and even less unwilling to let anyone else try the same. 

“Don’t know, I was too busy being shaken around like a doll,” said Marcille. 

“Usually their grip like that is strong enough to shatter bones, you’re lucky your neck didn’t break…What did the pressure feel like? I imagine it must have been incredible. Like being enclosed in a nice, pressurized hazmat suit helm,” said Laios with unbridled enthusiasm and wonder that many should envy.

Marcille looked at Laios for a long time, her eyes as wide as they could manage in her semi-necrotic sockets.   

---

While they were cooking, Senshi instructed Chilchuck and Laios to remove the seeds from the Spore Plant fruit. 

“I think she’s mad at me again,” said Laios. 

“Well yeah, you asked if her getting her skull crushed by a mutant plant felt nice,” said Chil. 

The synth took his knife and cut the fruit in half before ripping out the stem and the bulb of seeds inside of it. It came apart kind of like a pepper and when he further diced the remains, he slid it over to Senshi, who reduced it to a thin red paste with a mortar and pestle. 

“First you reduce the fruit to either a paste or if you can a liquid,” explained the wasteland gastronomist. “Once that, you boil it with some water and then you add Gel.” 

He produced a wax paper bag of powder and began to add it to the boiling water, “This is gelatine mix, it’s flour, cave fungus, and boiled brahmin bone gelatine. I would make it myself, but I am not an expert on the specifics of gelatine making. Add some of last night’s soup to it and we’re good to go.”

As that mix boiled, he took out a frying pan and began to make a crust out of a box a paper-wrapped sleeve of crackers and water. As the minutes ticked on, he took the mix off the fire and put the frying pan in its place. He then carefully poured the mixture into the crust as it cooked. 

Marcille stood to the side and watched. She almost got her neck broken so they could make a pie. Maybe this is some kind of divine test. This was one of god’s many trials to put her through. She didn’t seriously entertain these thoughts, but she imagined herself destroying Senshi and Laios with incredible psychic power.

Spore Plant Tart

1 Radscorpion Soup

4 Spore Plant Fruits

1 Sleeve of crackers

½ can of purified water.

1 Gel-Mix.

Serves 3-4

+ 19 hit points for four minutes

+ 1 Endurance

+ 9 Radiation

- 12 Hunger

Laios was naturally, the first to take a bite out of his slice. Mistakenly bit into the crust which was slightly burnt, but the red, fruity gel of the tart was savory. Bordering on steak sauce. 

“The crust is just there to prevent the gel from burning. Don’t bother eating it,” said Senshi.

“It’s rather salty,” commented Chil as he bit into a spoonful of it. The synth generally preferred the sweetness of Fancy Lad Snack Cakes, but in truth, he indulged in the saltier flavors nature had to offer. It’s part of what ended his marriage. 

“Give it a shot, Marcille,” said Laios. Such a sweet young man.

Marcille took her spoon and dug into the gel of the tart before eating. In a way, she was thinking of it not solely as a radioactive pie that would heal her body, but also as a means of getting back at that bastardly plant. 

She chewed her bite for a long moment. The flavor of the gel was radiant. Not only did the mild radioactivity aid her, but it was divine in flavor and texture. Like a salty and savory cheesecake almost. 

She looked over at Senshi as he washed out his cast iron pan with a jovial smile on his face. No, Senshi wasn’t God or the devil…He was like Santa. 

Chapter Text

At night, Marcille dreams of California. It isn’t California as you know it, dear reader. It isn’t the California she knew either. It’s the California of her dreams. She imagined herself sitting in a room with Falin. Falin’s eyes were squinting as she lounged in a folding chair on a beach, staring at the oceanic horizon. Marcille was beside her in an identical chair. Her skin was smooth and her hair hung in long enough to reach her hips. 

Falin said something, but it wasn’t clear. It’s one of those dream things where you can tell that it is a person speaking, but they aren’t speaking words. In an instant, Falin ages. Marcille’s skin is no longer smooth, it’s mottled and flaking off. Rising from the surf she can see Laios and Chilchuck, both are also as ancient as humans can be. Their bodies rendered thin from the passage of time and their faces lined with wrinkles. Chilchuck is the first to die, collapsing face-first into the sand as the tide washes over his frail little body. Laios follows after him, joining his friend in the surf. Marcille turns and sees Falin again, only now she isn’t aged. She’s as she was the last time Marcille saw her. Young and beautiful with her arm covered in gore and hanging off of her shoulder, barely attached by thin strands of flesh-thread. 

Marcille’s eyes shot open and she’s no longer in California. She’s sitting up staring at Laios who is also awake. Taking his shift of the night watch. His eyes were wide and his face was illuminated by the light of his Pip-Boy.

“Go back to sleep,” he says. “Everything’s gonna be alright.”

Chapter Text

NCR Bike Messengers are the lifeblood of communication networks on the California Coast, with routes that ran from The Boneyard to as far south as Valladolid. They were often faster than NCR mail caravans and less costly than courier services, making them ideal for transporting personal messages.

Private Tom Goss was decidedly not fit to serve as an NCR Bike Messenger. He could feel the muscles in his legs burn as he peddled as hard as he could down the near-endless streets that lead to the Boneyard Pier. 

Private Tom had shrugged off gunfire from a .22 and avoided a Shi gang that had taken control of one of the old warehouses. They could be real territorial sons of bitches sometimes. 

The path leads him to a small, private dock that had up until a few months ago, been unoccupied. At the dock was a small steamboat, steadily churning out enough smoke to shroud the deck,  save for a handful of still, human shapes. 

Seeing that nobody was around, Tom dismounted his bike and took out the bag of letters, taking great care to approach the boat. In the smoke, he heard something that sounded like a gun being cocked and an animal hiss. 

“Approach slowly,” said an accented woman from the smoke. 

"Alright," said Tom. He then punctuated it with a "Sorry."

Tom took his mailbag off and raised it up with both arms as he eased his way down the slick wooden dock, towards the solid steel gangplank, his eyes focused on the larger figure moving down along the boat’s length.

“Speak your business, you’re a courier, right?” asked the voice. 

“Kinda. I’m Private Tom Goss, NCR Messenger. I have a letter coming in from Merini,” he said.

The voice fell silent, murmuring in a language that Goss could only half understand. Then it spoke with a thunderous blast, “Tade.”

Tom first felt the vibration through his feet. Two more thunderous footfalls and he saw the boat shake. His muscles, as pained as they were tensed up and he felt…fear. Actual fear of death. 

Coming out of the smoke was a Super-Mutant dressed in a robe adorned with plates of weird armor, but not like one that Tom had ever seen. Lots of people in the wasteland had seen Super Mutants. But Tom had never seen one that was decidedly female. Or who seemed to have actual hair? It was black and tied back in two tails, while her bangs were parted by some kind of artificial horns. He couldn’t tell what they were made from, but they were close to the color of her dull pink skin.

In one of her hands, she held a massive club that was roughly half of Tom’s height. The other was extended towards him as she came to a stop before him on the dock. In it, she clutched a little cloth bag, weighed down with something.

“Here,” she said. “Caps for your troubles.” 

He took the bag and in turn, she took the letter. She smiled down at him, and Goss continued to feel fear. He couldn’t recall seeing a Super-Mutant smile, either.

Chapter Text

The party took a hatch in the floor that led down into a room that some Khans from the south used as a chem lab. It was abandoned, but nobody knew why. Laios figured it had to do with the radiation, as his Pip-Boy made whispering ticks. It wasn’t a super high amount, but if they stayed there long, they’d probably end up like Marcille. Well…he and Senshi would, Chilchuck would probably be fine. He wasn’t sure if the radiation immunity was something Synths had innately or if it only applied to certain types. He’d started to ask him once, but Chilchuck changed the subject. Despite being an openly artificial man, he wasn’t too comfortable with talking about the minutiae of how his body worked. Apparently baseline humans in The Commonwealth aren’t huge fans of them.

Chilchuck produced a sudden hiss and the party stopped. His ears picked up something. That was one thing Chil did tell Laios about. Most “Searcher” Synths like himself were built with hypersensitivity in mind. It made it ideal for searching Pre-war ruins and walking away intact. 

“Laios,” said Chilchuck. “I’m going to need a boost.” 

Without further prompting, Laios hefted up the smaller man and carried him, while his fingers trailed along the darkened ceiling of the tunnel. The synth’s eyes widened when he found what he was looking for along it and dug out a pair of tiny tin snips and a ceramic scalpel. 

The group watched as he began cutting at a long cord that spanned the length of the ceiling, further along the tunnel they watched a Tesla trap produce a bright arc of electricity before going out. 

“That’s enough of that,” said Chilchuck. “You can put me down now.”

“Incredible,” said Senshi. “I wouldn’t have guessed that was there.”

“You wouldn’t have,” said Chilchuck. “There’s this faint electric whine. Only synths can hear it.” 

There was a chirping hiss somewhere down the hall and it threw everyone into a defensive stance. Forming a back to back circle.

“IS IT THE DEATHCLAW!?” shouted Marcille. Momentarily forgetting herself as she shot a beam of laser down the hall. Briefly illuminating a pack of Geckos who then took note of them. “Shit.”  

Laios had always rather liked Geckos. They had a silly upright walk that reminded him of how toddlers ran. Stomping their little clawed feet as they’d rush at people. They were also around Chilchuck’s height so it didn’t take much effort for him to sweep their legs, knocking one out before sinking his sword into its skull. 

Senshi did the same, bashing in one’s skull with a fire ax, but he turned in the direction of Marcille, “Ghoul Girl, bash them with your rifle. They’re useless to us if you disintegrate them.”

“I know what I’m doing!” she shouted at him.

While shouting one of the Geckos made to bite her, latching onto her arm. Marcille screamed as loudly as she could while beating the giant lizard like a dirty rug. 

“Yeah! Kick it’s fucking cunt in!” shouted Chilchuck, who was hiding behind a bunch of boxes, taking potshots at the lizards with a .22 revolver.

By the time the gang was done, they were covered in blood and sweat, exhausted from the ordeal. Then the hunger set in. Everyone could feel it. Laios, chief among them. 

Senshi had turned over the body of a lizard and began examining it in the dark. Trying to work out what to do with it. 

“Laios,” he asked. “Could you come over here and shine your thing over this?” 

“Hmm? The Pip-Boy light?” He asked. 

“Whatever it is,” said Senshi. 

Laios walked over to the little man and stood over him, positioning the Pip-Boy’s light so that it shined over the limp body of the gecko. 

“During the fight, I was thinking of Gecko steaks, but that’s hardly filling. We could probably make a stock out of the remaining spore plant seeds…but now I’m remembering something from an old Pre-War book,” said Senshi. 

“What’s the recipe?” asked Marcille, her eyes narrowing as she silently awaited whatever horror Senshi had to offer.

The little man drew a knife and made a y-incision at the base of the lizard’s neck, before drawing the tail of the Y down the length of its body towards the protruding belly. Spilling open foul smelling lizard guts and a series of semi-oval pods. 

“Just as I suspected,” he said. “Eggs. A decent source of protein. “I’m thinking…hmm, fried steak chunks in a curry sauce.”

“How do eggs factor into that?” aske Marcille.

Senshi fixed her with a look. “Have you ever eaten fried rad chicken before? Same principle.”

Senshi and Laios began to remove the eggs from the body of the lizard, followed by the organs. 

“Laios,” he said, offering the young man a liver and the kidneys. “Debone them and mix a few of the bones with these in some water then boil them. The broth will be essential.” 

He then cracked open the lizard's jaw and ripped out its tongue in a quick, fluid motion. He was an artist. A kind of artist cloaked in the sheer nightmare of his craft.

After removing all of the organs, Laios began to boil them along with some bones. He then helped Senshi take the lizard and suspend it upside down, draining the creature's blood into a large jar. Marcille looked at the scene and it reminded her of a time when she saw a desert ranger stringing up a bandit. His face had turned purple before the ranger delivered the final execution. 

“First,” he said. “You’ll want to peel off the skin. Following that, you’ll carve off sections of meat like so.”

Senshi demonstrated this upon skinning the lizard. This knife ran along different lengths of its body, coming away with massive cuts of dripping red lizard flesh. After piling the mess of meat onto a wooden board, he began to render it into Julienne slices.

“Now Laios,” he began. “While I do this, crack several of the eggs into a bowl and whisk them good with a fork.”

Laios looked the the lizard eggs. They had a semi-leathery shell. He’d seen Gecko eggs of course, but he’d never cracked one. Finding it squished against the side of the bowl without breaking. So, taking his sword, he stabbed it, draining the broken yolk and whites into the bowl.

Marcille then spoke, “Isn’t this a bit…fucked up? Y’know? Marinating the diced mother corpse in the liquified remains of what would have been their young?” 

Senshi turned to look at her, his knife slick with blood, completely unaware of how threatening this looked, “No?”

She winced and watched as he scraped the meat into Laios’ egg bowl.

“If we had the time, I'd let them sit in the egg mixture for an hour or two, but since we’re slow to go, we’re going to start on the curry sauce,” said Senshi.

From his bag, he took out a few basic things: 

1. a medium-sized jug of clear-brown liquid.
2.  a few washed carrots.
3. a carton of dirty water.
4. a bag of Radaway.
5. a tiny jar of white powder. 
6. a jar of crushed tatos.
7. a jar of curry powder. 

It was a whole solar system of ingredients that made Marcille’s head spin.

“Where were those when you had us eat the Spore Plants?” asked Marcille. 

If she had a nose, she would be looking down at Senshi with it.

Senshi barely seemed to register that there was anything weird about his casual carrots. Especially when dealing with a woman who felt slighted. Justifiably so, considering the thrashing the monster plant gave her. 

“They were in my bag,” he said like it was the most obvious statement in the world. 

Marcille considered that she could probably just kill the entire group and nobody would know that they’re down there. Their corpses would lie in the cave forever. But she wouldn’t do that. She was sensible. She wasn’t feral. 

Senshi began to chop the carrots and mix them into the jar with the tatos. He poured some water in and began to stir-mash them into a paste with a bent metal spoon. 

The white powder was added later, reverting the mix into a creamy red color. 

“What’s that?” asked Chilchuck. 

“It’s powdered brahmin milk,” explained Senshi. “I learned from an old book that before the war they’d often make powdered cow’s milk so that it could be shelf stable. I loved the idea. It’s good for long stays underground.”

It sounded vaguely familiar to Marcille. 

“The curry powder will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting flavor wise,” he said. “I wish we had some rice to pair all of this with, but beggars can’t be choosers…mmm, or delicious noodles…That reminds me. It occurs to me that most of our food hasn’t hit us with as much radiation as most food.” 

“Yeah?” said Laios. “Shouldn’t that be good?”

“Normally, yes,” said Senshi. “But it spaced my mind that she needs radiation.”

Senshi gestured at Marcille with his spoon. Her eyes went wide…as wide as necrosis would allow.

Laios smacked himself on the head, “Of course…I had forgotten, I’m so used to most of what we eat having rads that I didn’t notice that it wasn’t doing much for you. I’m sorry, Marcille.”

By that time the stock was boiling and Laios removed it, adding the filtered liquid to Senshi’s sauce jar. By then he’d set out to breading the lizard with the remaining crackers from Senshi’s bag.

“The Radaway will have to the rest of our meals afterward. We can’t venture forward if the lack of radiation is impacting your overall health,” said Senshi.

“While we’re on the subject,” said Chilchuck. “I don’t need the Radaway, so you two can keep it to yourselves.”

“What?” asked Senshi. 

“I have immunity to radiation,” explained Chilchuck, a smug smile overtaking his face. “I’m just built differently.”

Marcille started crying a tiny bit as she realized that Senshi had corrected some of his ignorance. However, this feeling was tempered when just behind her, she could see the splayed open corpse of a giant gecko.

The jar was placed in the remaining water within Senshi’s cooking pot, lightly boiling the contents within. Once removed the water was transferred to a mug. Senshi then emptied the oil bottle into the pot and began to sit the breaded lizard slices within. 

“These should be cooked until the breading is nice and crispy,” he said, flipping them over with a pair of chopsticks to get evenly cooked on both sides.

Once done, the strips of gecko meat were removed from the oil, the oil was poured into a jar and it was replaced by the sauce mixed with the noodles. 

“It’s ready!” said Senshi

Gecko Wasteland Curry

2 Gecko Steak (Julianned) 

½ Sleeve of Crackers

1 Bottle of Corn Oil

2 Carrots

1 Jar of Powdered Brahmin Milk

2 Mashed Tatos (Jarred)

1 Jar of Bone/Organ Broth

2 Tablespoons of Curry Powder

Side of Radaway

Serves 4

- 211 Hunger

+ 50 Radiation

+ 55 HP for 20 seconds.

- (50 with Radaway)

Marcille watched as her traveling companions, save for Chilchuck mixed the bag of Radaway into their bowls of lizard curry. Her eyes looked down at the hearty semi-soup before her. It had a strong smell despite the contents of it being mostly water. She took her spoon and swept up a bit of meat, dripping with the sauce. 

The moment of truth was before her, lads. Was this going to be the thing that finally kills her? Would Senshi reveal himself to be a fucked up raider working a long con on them? Would he eat them? She didn’t want to be ghoul-jerky.

She bit into the meat chunk and her eyes went wild. 

“It’s almost like…like fishy-chicken,” she said before violently slurping it down like her very life depended upon it. The radiation that was infused into the meat and sauce made her body shake, but she felt stronger. Her eyes nearly glowed with the energy from it.

The others did not notice.

“The sauce hits it just right,” said Laios. “I’ve read in a few old books about places in the east where Lizard Curry is fairly common. I wonder how close this is to those old recipes.” 

“I can’t say for certain,” said Senshi. “But I hope that I am doing those ancient ghosts proud by my recreation here, in this dark, nightmare cave.”

The ghosts of the old world are constantly screaming. Senshi, however, doesn’t know that. Nor should he. Because they are over there, and the ghosts over there need to take care of themselves. The ghosts of the caves however are silently watching and judging the party.

Who knows what nightmares lurk in the further depths? 

Chapter Text

Deep below the surface, there are communities of people who live. It doesn’t take much for settlements on the surface to force people out. These places aren’t like the vaults. No, they’re mostly hovels carved out of the walls of what used to be a mine. But still, vast nonetheless with crude streets and stalls.

Marcille could smell food being cooked around, real food too, not horrors from the dark. Brahmin steaks, noodles, and something like funnel cake make her stomach ache. 

They’d been through the tunnel city once before, but after a long trip from the surface, they couldn’t help but to be overwhelmed by the sight of it all—streets illuminated by glowing fungi and lamps fashioned from old Fusion cells. Despite her hunger and the sorrow of losing Falin, Marcille couldn’t help but smile. This tunnel city of ex-raiders, fallen Legionaries, and criminals was a sign to her that maybe the world could rebuild itself. 

This enthusiasm was only briefly halted as she watched an Ex-Legionary getting bludgeoned to death in front of the party, causing them to take a turn on the street. 

“You know,” said Chilchuck. “This place fucking sucks.” 

“I don’t much care for this place myself,” said Senshi as he guided them through the streets. “Though, this is one of the few settlements where I can get ingredients without having to go to Merini. Then there’s that.”

Senshi pointed across the street to a white brick structure built out of one of the walls. The roof was black and covered in tar, and affixed to the top of it was a giant, pink doughnut statue. A monument to old-world capitalism thriving in the dark. 

“A doughnut shop?” asked Laios.

“A Slocum’s Joe?” specified Chilchuck.

Marcille breathed a sigh, she was finally going to eat a normal meal. Food that wasn’t made from horrible plants or lizard monsters. But then she realized that they were broke. 

From his bag, Senshi produced a fat sack of caps like a wasteland sugar daddy, jingling them like it wasn’t a big deal. 

“I think this should be sufficient to tie us over for the morning, what do you think, gang?” he said. 

Marcille’s eyes were wide and pointed in two opposing directions. She’s kind of like a prey animal, like a brahmin or  a radstag, always looking for vague threats when stressed or surprised.

Chilchuck, meanwhile, began to gesticulate wildly, “You had caps this entire time!”

“Well, yeah. I have caps, NCR Dollars, a few Legion coins, but those are useless,” said Senshi. “I can’t farm and forge for everything, lad.”

[Chilchuck Hated That]

“So,” he continued. “Who’s up for a sugary breakfast?”

The group strolled into the doughnut shop. The woman behind the counter was a plump human with small eyes, but a welcoming smile. She wore a pink button up shirt, with the top few buttons undone so the collar could lay flat across her chest and shoulders like the lapels of a jacket. Her name tag read “Francine Carlson”. And above it rested the Slocum’s Joe Logo. 

“Let me know when you’re ready, folks,” she said in an affected customer service voice. 

Chilchuck bristled at the sound of it and whispered to Marcille, “They’re just as creepy as they are in the Commonwealth.” 

Laios went over to the long glass case that was full of a variety of different doughnuts. Francine’s wide smile faded and she began to slowly lift a big metal club. 

“Wow,” said Laios before being harshly tugged away from the glass by Chilchuck. “Such variety.” 

Laios’ eyes fell on a traditional looking doughnut. It’s frosting was a glowing fluorescent blue and was speckled with tiny gold colored sprinkles and flickering blue crystals. 

“What is that one,” he asked Francine, pressing his finger to the glass.

“Quantum Crunch,” she said, her patience had never before been tried like this.

Laios looked up at the chalkboard menu and spied a coffee. A Quantum Caffinator, “I’ll take that, and The Quantum Caffinator.” 

Senshi stood behind him, locking eyes with Francine, jingling his sack of caps, this time to emphasize that they were paying and not doing some kind of elaborate stickup.

Francine produced a wax paper sheet and pulled out the doughnut, “Here. I’ll have your coffee ready in a sec, hun.”  

Laios’ eyes were wild and his pupil ultra dilated, “Thank you.”

Senshi was up next and he seemed to already know his order without needing to browse the menu for too long. Senshi is a man of refinement and good taste like that, “Boston Style Coffee and a Fudge Fusion if you don’t mind, miss.” 

Like with Laios she produced a traditional doughnut, covered in a white, black sprinkle flecked frosting, wrapped neatly in a wax paper sheet. 

“Thank you kindly,” he said, paying for his food and the rest in advance with a handful of caps. 

Then Marcille stepped up to the counter, practically overwhelmed by the sweet smells coming from the little kitchenette behind Francine that filled the air with the best aroma the world can offer. 

“Double espresso…and…a rainbow doughnut, please,” she smiled. 

Francine produced the doughnut with her lips pursed. It was indeed covered in a rainbow arrangement of icing, but her expression felt very, “I know what you are.”

Marcille sat down with the others and that left Chilchuck, like Senshi, he knew what he wanted and didn’t take too much time with his order, “Irish Coffee and go very heavy on the whiskey, if you please, Francine. Pair that with a…Classic Sweetroll, I guess.” 

Francine made a small snort laugh and handed him a brown, mini bundt cake like pastry that was lightly drizzled with sweet smelling frosting. Internally Chilchuck’s mind played a chanting as he eagerly took the doughnut from her. 

Laios Order:

---------------------------

Quantum Crunch Doughnut

1 Purified Water

1 Nuka Cola Quantum

1 Doughnut Mix

+15 Energy Resistance

+15 Health 

+1 Radiation

50mg Caffeine. 

Quantum Caffinator

1 Nuka Cola

1 Coffee

1 Shot of espresso

1 Honey

+400 Health

+100 Action Points

+2 Radiation

200mg Caffeine

Laios’s drink was served in a tall, chipped glass and both it and the doughnut made the geiger counter on his arm tick wildly. Senshi gave him a side eye as he sipped his drink, his eyes taking on a wide eyed stare. 

“I’ve never felt this calm in my life,” said Laios. “Is that weird to say?”

“Very,” said Chilchuck without any hesitation as he tore off a piece of his doughnut and dipped it in his coffee.

Chilchuck’s Order:

-------------------------

Irish Coffee:

1 Purified Water

1 Coffee

2 shots of Whiskey

+2 strength for 2 minutes

Classic Sweet Roll

+15 Health

+5 Melee Damage for Five Minutes

+5 Action Points for 20 Minutes

The taste of the pastry was slightly sweet and the texture was flakey. Soaked in black, whiskey flooded coffee made the sweetness of the melted icing and pastry explode with life as it slid down his synthetic throat.He couldn’t help but revel in how strong he felt. 

Marcille slammed her tiny cup of espresso, her expression briefly warping with disgust as she choked down the bitter liquid. She chased it with her doughnut.

Marcille’s Order:

------------------------

Double Espresso

1 Purified Water

2 Shots of Espresso

128 Mg Caffeine 

Rainbow Doughnut

1 Doughnut Mix

1 Purified Water

+15 Health Points

+65 Poison Resistance for 20 minutes

“Jesus Christ,” said Chilchuck as he watched his companion choke down her coffee. “How can you drink that?”

“It’s repulsive stuff,” added Senshi.

“It’s glorious,” said Marcille smiling as she took a tiny bite out of the doughnut.

“But it’s so bitter,” said Laios.

“I mean,” she shrugged, “yeah, but you drink it quickly so you don’t think about it.”

Senshi shrugged, not getting it even a little as he dug into his doughnut. The icing was silky and the black flecks were like dark chocolate, contrasting against the smooth icing and sweet chocolate of the doughnut’s body.

Senshi’s Order

----------------------

1 Brahmin Milk 

1 Coffee

1 Purified Water

+20 Carry Weight for 20 Minutes

+110 Health 

+40 Action Points

+5 Radiation

60mg Caffeine

Fudge Fusion Doughnut

1 Purified Water

1 Doughnut Mix

+15 Health

+1 Perception for 20 Minutes

The party was shaking, fueled by the caffeine and overwhelmed with the health fuel of the doughnuts. After finishing they could watch chaos happening outside as the people of the town outside. Scuttling among the buildings were incredible beasts, beasts from the horrible depths of cave lakes and rivers. Mirelurks. They used their powerful pincers to cut down able bodied men, women, and even the children armed with high powered assault rifles. Those who they couldn’t rip apart with their claws were rammed and smashed between the hard shells and rocky walls.

They group looked between one another and left the restaurant, fueled to help the townsfolk bash some crabs good.

Chapter Text

The group took another tunnel, their bodies glutted on mirelurk cakes they’d crafted from the wholesale slaughter of the mirelurks in Tunnel-Town. The weather had become cooler and deeper within the cave, which came as a relief to Marcille.

Up ahead the group spotted an infestation of radroaches engaged in a fight with a mole rat. Marcille felt dread again, but despite feeling glutted on the mirelurk meat, she couldn’t help but know that she’d need radiation to recover later. 

“Why does god hate me, Chilchuck?” she asked, turning to him.

 Chilchuck was already crouched down and firing upon the roaches with his .22 pistol.

“What’d you say?” he asked. Trying not to hit Laios as he slashed at the creatures with reckless abandon.

The Entomologist Perk served him well. He ran up to Senshi holding up the limp body of a mole rat.

“I’m thinking Burger Bits,” he said. 

“Burger Bits?” asked Marcille, her head lowering with gastronomic despair. 

“I think that could work,” said Senshi. From his pack, he pulled out an old Tesla trap and looked at Chilchuck. “Do you think we could cook with this?” 

Chilchuck now understood how Marcille felt, “Mind running that by me again?” 

“Could…We use this like a hotplate,” began to elaborate Senshi. “And cook with it?”

Chilchuck looked at the broken trap, then back at Senshi, “No. It whips people with electricity.”

“Yeah, but…” He said, “What if we directed the channels upwards, then use coiled metal to act as a burner.”

“How did you survive in the caves for as long as you claim without being murdered by a trap?” asked Chilchuck.

He supposed what Senshi was suggesting existed within the realm of possibility, but it was still a Tesla Trap. They threw around big arcs of electricity when anyone was near them. 

Chilchuck produced from his bag, his meager trap breaker tools. Wire cutters, duct tape, pliers, bobby pins, coat hanger, fragmentation mine (disarmed), and a bottle of scotch. 

“Hand me the trap,” he said, reluctantly looking at the device he’d disarmed days prior. 

Senshi handed over the trap and Chil began to unwind the hook of the coat hanger. A Tesla Trap resembles a smoke alarm, with a large metal “bell”, the center of which has a small metal tube protruding from the center. Its base is a ceramic shell, ringed by fusion cores. 

He unfolded the coat hanger, making it into a long, thin, metal rod. He wrapped tape around one end and began to bend it into a coil, working the tapeless end of it into the tube of the trap. The half-effective trap gave him a slight shock as he worked it in.

“Cocksucker, motherfucker!” he growled as it happened.

[Chilchuck hated that]

“Chilchuck?” asked Marcille. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine!” he shouted. 

He was going to make this stupid trap work and he was going to cook Senshi with it if he got shocked again. He slowly worked out one of the fusion cores and pocketed it. That could fetch a hefty sack of caps topside. 

The coil began to get hotter as he wound it up into a tighter position. If two people held the big pot in place, it should support whatever he was cooking.

“How well do you think it’ll do with temperature control?” asked Senshi.

“I really wouldn’t know,” said Chilchuck. “I don’t cook.” 

Senshi pursed his lips, “I saw you take out one of those fusion cores, maybe adding them or removing them also reduces the heat?”

Chilchuck imagined randomly plugging in and removing the cores would both weaken the cores and probably break the trap. His mind wondered if it would explode and kill all of them. But, that felt hyperbolic…and optimistic. It’d probably just fry the internal mechanisms and make it useless.

“At a certain point,” said Chil. “I think, it’s just easier to give into the deranged whims of this group, rather than fighting about it. But once this stupid thing blows up in our faces I’m going to do a little jig about how stupid this was.”

Laios, who was prying the semi-hard shell of a radroach apart to get at its soft meats cast his confused gaze over to Chilchuck, “What’s deranged about the whims of our party?”

Marcille said nothing, narrowing her eyes as she watched Laios dig out the meat with a knife.

Chilchuck continued to work at it, gradually pulling out fusion cores so the device could have a somewhat easy-to-regulate temperature. He figured that the cable that ran along the ceiling was meant to help regulate the amount of energy given to the trap at a given time, but without it, the trap could only stand up to a few bursts of energy before dying.

Before long, it was up and Senshi was holding the pot upright as Laios and Marcille emptied cubed meat bits into it, followed by a jar of bone broth. The jar was set aside. Gradually the liquid began to evaporate or be absorbed into the meat chunks. 

“Normally,” began Laios with a smile on his face. “Burger bits are meant as pet food.” 

“You… Laios, did you suggest to Senshi that he cook us dog food?” asked Marcille, who felt unsure if she was about to cry or scream. Probably both if this kept on.

“I mean,” said Laios. “Not intentionally. It should be fine, people eat radroaches and molerats all the time.” 

“But you said “Burger Bits” like it was a completely normal thing and not stuff you give to a feral hound!” shouted Chilchuck. “It’s hardly fit for human consumption.”

Senshi cleared his throat, “The boy’s right.” 

[ Chilchuck hated that ]

“Burger Bites present us with an incomplete meal,” he said, ignoring the fact that he had just cooked a couple of jars full of dog food. “We need to supplement our meat intake with something else. We’ll need the fiber in the days that lay ahead of us.”

“What a strange way to phrase that,” pondered Marcille. 

Senshi pulled a handful of the fusion cores out of the trap to make it cool down. With each one, Chilchuck felt a part of his synthetic soul die. He could feel the value of it drop and drop hard. When everything had cooled down, Senshi cleaned and hefted the pot and his cooking supplies onto his back. 

“I have an encampment up ahead, we can resupply there and head further down, there’s a settlement where we can get additional ingredients,” he said.

As they walked on, Marcille allowed her pace to drag behind to Laios so she could elbow him in the belly for the Burger Bits situation.

Senshi’s path took them down and into another room. It had black rubbery tiles that were covered in dirt, but it was remarkably well-lit. To Laios, it almost reminded him on one of the rooms from the Vault his settlement was built around. If it wasn’t for the giant mass of dirt and vegetation in the corner, it would feel sterile. Just beyond it, he could see a rough wooden door and assumed that was where Senshi lived. 

The giant mass of dirt shifted up, and a pair of gun arms and a tripod of wheel legs shifted the entire mass upwards. It turned to face them, revealing that it was a Sentry bot covered in plants.

Everyone except Senshi ducked back into the hall as the bullets started to fly. His body was ducked low as he barreled towards it, getting behind the mass as it fired randomly, its body getting red like superheated iron.

They watched as Senshi dug his fist into the foliage concealed back fo the thing and pried out yet another goddamn fusion core, shutting down the robot. 

When the robot’s body fell limp and its hard iron shell began to cool, Senshi went over to the little hole in the wall and produced a rudimentary gardening shovel and a wet cloth sack that might have once been a pillowcase. 

The rest of the Touden party stood in awe of the sudden and immediate movements of their mysterious friend. Laios walked over and examined the robot, running its hand along the exposed chest of the thing. It was still warm to the touch like it had been left to sit out in the sun for a long time.

“This is impressive,” he said. “I’ve never seen a sentry bot covered in this much dirt and stuff while still being active.” 

“Me neither,” said Marcille shooting Senshi a suspicious look. “You knew where the fusion core on it was, didn’t you?”

By that time, Senshi was digging out vegetables on the robot’s back with a shovel, showing off a carrot that she reckoned was about the size of a premature newborn. 

“Of course,” he said like it was the most normal thing on the face of the planet. “How else am I supposed to protect my garden from the animals that live down here?”

“By all rights, if you can take down a Sentry bot, you’re doing the world a favor,” said Chil as he walked over to the thing. “Why not just use it as a guard? Y’know, reprogram it to only attack things that attack the garden?” 

“I thought about that for a time,” said Senshi. “For a while, I did that, but no matter what I did, old Noor here kept rolling over the plants and crushing them. So, I found that I could yield more vegetables if I memorized his attack patterns and grew them on him.”

“Makes sense,” said Laios. 

Marcille shot him a look that said, Does it?

“I mean,” he elaborated. “This way it is kind of has motivation to keep on going and protect the vegetation even if it’s not aware of them. Sentry Bots are built to protect two things, both themselves and the location it’s placed in…Judging from this room, this might have been somebody’s attempt to build something like a vault, but it never got off the ground…my best guess is they wasted their money on the bot and never finished the room. People can be dumb like that.”

“Very cynical today, Laios,” chirped Chilchuck. 

“I think I’m worn out,” he said. “Let’s just help Senshi harvest the veg.” 

So the group did, gaining a sizable number of vegetables stuffed in sacks, clothes and the like, all before strolling out and further down the tunnels. 

“You said there was a settlement up ahead,” said Chilchuck. “Think your customers are going to be interested in what we have on hand?”

“Possibly,” said Senshi. “One can hope anyways.”

The walk wasn’t long, they ended up at a place that nobody would describe as a settlement. It was a single, wooden shack built out of a cave wall. 

Senshi strolled in, followed by the others. They were immediately approached by a synth. A first-generation one, hunched over with his metal teeth clacking as he spoke in his mechanical voice. 

“What’s going on, travelers? Need a place to rest your weary heads?” he asked. “If you’ve got the caps, we’ve got the cots.”

“We were actually hoping to do a little trading,” said Senshi. 

He offered a handful of oversized carrots and even though the synth lacked a pseudo dermis, everyone except Laios could immediately tell he had started scowling. 

He reached over and smacked the carrots out of Senshi’s hand. That’s when they watched his expression turn dark. The second those carrots hit the floor, they all began to easily imagine Senshi taking the synth’s face in his hands and squeezing until something went “Crunch”. 

“If you treat food like that, you’ll get yours in the end!” shouted Marcille.

They didn’t have the time to see it. Nobody had the time too. As soon as that happened, Chilchuck turned and saw the door to the shitty bar break open, a pair of towering super mutants standing in the opening. 

“Kill everyone and take anything useful!” he shouted over the now screaming crowd. More rushed in. Senshi stood in place even as a Super Mutant kicked the synth to death. 

Chilchuck dived behind the bar and hid as the various criminals and vagabond outcasts were slaughtered by towering green people.

“Why are super mutants here?” asked Laios. “I never thought they made it into the depths of the cave.” 

“Who gives a shit!” shouted Marcille. “We have to get-!” 

 She looked up and saw a Super Mutant standing beside her. Their hand slowly loving down to possibly pick her up or rip her apart. She closed her eyes, feeling like she could embrace death quickly if she shut off her brain and accepted it. 

Senshi moved his hand up, locking eyes with the mutant, his action staying the mutant’s downward grasp at Marcille. When nothing happened, she opened her eyes and saw that the mutant had reached down to grab a handful (and it was a handful) of gargantuan onions from Senshi’s garden. Senshi’s movement wasn’t to stop the mutant, it was his way of trying to keep her from panicking. 

“What are you doing paling around with these humans, Senshi?” he asked. He pitched a single onion at the little man and he caught it. 

He caught it like a professional baseball player, an extinct race of super-beings, “I could ask you the same thing. The guys in gals in your group seem a touch bloodthirsty.”

“They’re from the capital wasteland,” he explained. “A bit on the dim side, but they’re learning.”

The super mutant sniffed the air, “A man, a ghoul, and something else…I don’t think I know what he is. Man-shaped, that’s for sure.” 

Chilchuck’s nose wrinkled at that remark, “Synth.” 

He gestured with his head at the crushed synth on the floor, “Kind of like him.”

Chilchuck then directed his attention to Senshi, “These are your usual customers, aren’t they?”

He nodded.

“I wouldn’t know,” he said, disgust in his voice. But this softened slightly when focusing on Senshi. “Senshi and I go way back, and for that, I’ll spare you and your weakling friends. But we’re going to need your stuff.” 

“We did come down here to trade, Zon,” said Senshi. 

“I’m not asking, Senshi,” he said. “We’re having a rough time of it. A freakish thing…Some kind of fucked up alpha deathclaw forced us out of our settlement. We have families to feed. So…Give. Us. Your. Stuff.”

“Tell me!” shouted Laios, cutting past his friends and Senshi to stare directly up at the mutant, his eyes wild with desperation. “Where did you see it?” 

Zon gave a half smirk, “I’m not telling you that. As puny as you humans are, you like to get into our business and fuck things up for us. I’m not taking the risk.”

“Boss?” growled another mutant, his voice rougher, more gravely. His skin was stretched, revealing cracks of exposed nerves and muscle tissue. His lips were pulled back, revealing a mess of awful, perfectly straight teeth. “We’re dones killing everybody.” 

“Good man,” said Zon. “Take everything that isn’t nailed down. Weapons too.” 

A mutant behind the bar picked up a jar of white liquid and began to sniff it, “Eh? Rotten milk?” 

“Can’t you reason with them?” asked Marcille to Senshi.

Senshi pursed his lips, “Look…You aren’t open to trading, that’s fine…I’ll give you everything in exchange for something else. Let us stay with your people for the night. Do me that and you can have the veggies, my life, whatever you need.” 

The party stared at him with something approaching hate in their eyes. 

Senshi cast his eyes over to the mutant who was about to toss out what he thought was spoiled milk, “And you there! Don’t throw that out! It’s not rotten, it’s fermented! We’ll need it.” 

---

They took everyone’s weapons and marched them down the corridor with their hands bound together.

Marcille leaned down to whisper to Senshi, “They’re going to eat us.”

“Please tell me you have a plan,” said Laios. He leaned over on the opposite side of Senshi, not so much asking, but praying to him. “Please tell me you got a plan.” 

“You probably didn’t notice,” began Senshi. “But that jar is yeast. A leavening agent. And they stole all the sacks of flour from the back.” 

“What?” asked Chilchuck, who was completely lost in the man’s logic. 

“It means we can make BREAD!” he shouted with a smile on his face. 

“You are a goddamn moron!” shouted Chilchuck as he tried to kick at Senshi.

“Will you all shut the hell up!?” shouted one of the mutants. “Children! Arguing like savage children!” 

They arrived in another cave anti-chamber. A tent city full of Super mutants of all stripes. Marcille spotted a few small figures moving among the tents, but that didn’t feel right.

They were moved to a pen that had dried grass strewn around. It was unused, but if Marcille had to guess, it was going to be used for holding mutant hounds. 

“You’re going to have to stay in this pen,” said Zon as his party marched them inside. 

A small super mutant ran up and hugged Zon’s leg and Marcille’s mind snapped in half. A baby super mutant. 

“Dad’s back from his hunting trip!” exclaimed the child mutant.

“Wha?” she said weakly, staring at the sight.

Senshi screamed over the crowd, “What did you do with that yeast? You don’t know what it is, you don’t know how to use it! Just give it to me! I can make bread with it! Bread! Bread! Bread!” 

Someone tossed it at him and he collapsed onto the ground.He was left with a small fire in the middle of the pen. 

“You combine flour, salt, and leavening agent with water and place it in the greased pan like so. The flour and the oil keeping it from sticking to the bottom,” he explained. 

The super mutant child approached the pen and wrapped his hands around the links in the fence, “Are you playing with mud?” 

Zon stood by and picked up his child, “It’s time for your history lesson little’en. You see, a very long time ago, our people were constructed. A unified force under The Master. But when he was cut down, we were scattered to the winds. Others of us cropped up on opposite ends of the continent. Lost and violent souls looking for a home that wouldn’t run us off or kill us when we became useless.”

“Might not have happened if you’d stopped raiding settlements,” chirped Marcille. 

“I don’t think I asked for your opinion, ghoul!” he shouted. “Besides, I imagine you have had plenty of feral kin who’ve killed plenty of people. Probably lost their minds in the middle of settlements. Anyways. Our group lived peacefully in the warrens and rataways. Until they showed up and started leeching off of the ruins.” 

Senshi ignored all this and proceeded to pound a portion of the dough into a bowl, passing along identical balls of dough to Chil, Marcille, and Laios.

“They would come into places like Jacobstown, armed with laser rifles, flamers, fatmans, and try to destroy us even when we tried to live peacefully, away from them,” continued Zon.

“Again,” said Marcille. “It wouldn’t have happened if the risk of being raided wasn’t near constant. How many Nightkin would just roll up on settlements and lay siege to them while hiding behind a stealth boy?” 

“We did what we had to do to survive!” he shouted at her. 

“Your master ,” said Marcille, providing mean emphasis on the word. “Tried to build an ethnostate!”

“Marcille,” said Chilchuck. “We’re their guests, let’s not break out the bigotry big guns, here.” 

“Shut your fucking trap, synth!” shouted Zon, stepping over the gate and into the pin, followed by his tiny son.

“Get your fingers in there and work that dough!” shouted Senshi.

Zon grabbed the bowl and began to pound the dough harder than either Senshi or Chilchuck could ever manage. 

“You come here like a tourist to raid the places we’ve made our home! You’re no different than the chem-addled lunatics of the surface!” 

“The people of Merlini found the caves and the ruins first,” shouted Marcille, pounding into the dough hard enough to match Zon. “We’re just doing what we can with them to survive. 

“Once you get the dough all stretched and needy, that's when you do the first proofing,” said Senshi, still ignoring the argument mere feet away from him. “Cut your dough ball into little pieces and kneed with your hands.” 

Zon sat down and so did Marcille, both ignoring one another as they followed Senshi’s instructions. 

“Why are you so quiet, human?” asked Zon, casting his gaze over to Laios. “Don’t you have an opinion on things?” 

“Hmm?” he said, looking back at Zon.

“I’ve heard travelers. Mostly Psykers and the like talk about how old this cave is,” he said. “It started to form centuries ago. As caves do. But breakaway civilizations started to use it. Cults took up residence in the lowest depths before the war. They’re probably still down there. Either ghoulified or inbred or both. Taking over the “underground neighborhoods” and proto vaults.” 

“I don’t have an opinion on that,” said Laios. “Cults form all the time. Usually, they’re pretty harmless, until they go messing around with things like radiation.”

“Radiation,” chuffed Zon. “That’s a thing. Super Mutants are immune to it. You might have given into misconceptions that we’re nothing more than dumb brutes, but we’re far from it. I’ve read up on it. Have you ever thought about how it’s still around? It’s been centuries since the bombs fell, but the oceans are still irradiated. Fallout is still an issue, and it’s created things like her and the monsters of the wasteland?” 

“I’ve thought about it,” said Laios. “We traveled with a man from the east, Shuro. His country…Or…I guess the island that used to be his country was one of the first to have bombs used on it. He never talked about it, but I always wondered why it never produced ghouls then. Or things like giant fish.” 

“That leads me to think about things the Psykers say,” said Zon. “Maybe what we know as radiation is something else. Something that gets beyond the physical.” 

Marcille said, “That…is also something I studied with the followers. We had a few Psykers on staff and I would ask them about it. Their mutations usually came from FEV, but a few people demonstrated such powers without it. Some say it’s the atom as a god, some say Ug-Qualtoth, some even say it’s something from Christianity.” 

“Super mutants do not need gods,” said Zon. “Our god was murdered by some vault dweller. Way I see it, you’re probably here looking for the same thing, aye? Looking to unravel the secrets of radiation?” 

Laios paused, “No…I never really set out to do that. We came down here to retrieve my sister’s body. We were caught up by the deathclaw you described.”

“Hmm,” said Zon. “No greed, no glory, and no dreams of power. You’re almost noble, aren’t you?”

Senshi and the mutant

 child sat at the fire. He had to grab the baby’s wrist gently to keep him from putting it in the hot pan. Ending the baby’s plan by closing the lid. 

“Now we let the bread steam for a bit. If you’re ever able to find a dutch oven, this works on the same principle, but since we only have a fire, this will have to do.”

After it cooked Senshi lifted it up, revealing a gigantic loaf of interwoven knots of sweet-smelling doughy bread. 

“Now let’s have a taste,” said Senshi, reaching down before having his own wrist grabbed by Zon.

“Hold it,” he said. “That bread belongs to my people. We aren’t giving you any.” 

“What!” shouted Marcille.

“You said you wanted to make bread,” said Zon. “So we let you make it. We get to decide what to do with it.” 

“Daddy, we made it together, can’t we share it” said the baby mutant. 

Marcille looked and studied the child for a second. He didn’t look like an adult example of a mutant. His skin was untouched by uncontrolled, sudden muscle growth. He had hair growing out of the top of his head. He even moved in a more coordinated manner than the adults. Not so much stomping, but lightly walking like a human child. This kid wasn’t made by dunking an existing baby in FEV. This kid was somehow naturally produced.

Zon growled and relented. There was enough of the bread go go around the party and the small settlement.

“It’s not a proper meal if you only have bread,” said Marcille. Taking on a more gentle tone as she crouched down to speak to the kid. “I think what your daddy is trying to say is that this is…well, it’s an incomplete meal, bud. Do you like veggies? You need veggies, a main dish, and a side dish for a balanced meal, right?” 

The kid nodded. 

“Hey,” shouted Zon, exasperated by the ordeal. “Okay, get them anything they need!” 

Ingredients were gathered, the entire settlement and party began to cook and prepare as a well-oiled unit. A perfect machine, not unlike Senshi’s sentry bot. 

Burger Bits Sandwiches with Spicy Steamed Mixed Veggies

8 Carrots

8 Jars of Burger Bits (with broth-sauce)

6 Silt Beans

1 Loaf of Homemade Bread 

4 Bottles of Wine (for extra sauce and to get sauced, provided by the mutants.

1 Bottle Rita’s Hot Sauce (Provided by the mutants)

Serves 12

+50% Health Per Rank. 

- 17 Hunger

+ 18 Rad

+ 20% Carry Weight

Marcille cried a little when she bit into her sandwich. She’d piled some greens onto it and was unprepared for how much of a kick Rita’s Hot Sauce gave to a sammich.

Laios turned to Zon, his eyes again wide. “I know that you’re worried about us interfering with your settlement. We will clear out the deathclaw and if we can, we’ll leave as much as we can untouched. I just want to bring my sister back so I can bury her. I just need to know where it is.” 

Zon wrinkled his nose, considering this.

“I swear on my life,” he said.

Zon growled and called to an advisor, “Map?” 

When the advisor produced the map, he unfolded it for Laios’s edification. Pointing to an area marked off with red pen. 

“We encountered it here, in the south of a living area. It’s a residential-looking thing. Like a pre-war cul-de-sac,” he explained. 

“Thanks a lot,” said Laios, shaking the super mutant’s hand.

It’s important to think about unity. Not in the grand instance of what The Master wanted. But in the scaled-down aspects of life. Food is one of the great unifiers of life. You break bread with those who would consider you an enemy and you might walk away as their friend. Or…at least a distant acquaintance.

Chapter Text

Del’s Stay-Inn-Bed was located in one of the better parts of Merini Island, close to the mayor’s townhouse. The first floor of it used to be a department store, while the top half was demolished some years ago, replaced by the repurposed cabin of an airplane. Kabru prodded at his meal with his fork, pressing on the thick slice of Cram with the side of his fork until it came apart. He impaled it on his fork and examined it before eating it.

“Are you going to fall in love with it or are you going to eat it?” asked Rin. 

Cram, sweet rice, and fried tatos. Truly the breakfast of champions. Rin for her own part seemed to stick with coffee and a slice of grilled chicken, thank you very much.

“Forgive me for savoring this,” he said before repeating his previous action. “It'll be a while before we can enjoy a meal like this again.”

Del was a Protectron. Like most of his make and model, he couldn’t move without stomping around. Making his way over to the table where Kabru and his party sat. 

“You. Are. All. read. Eee. Heading. Back. Down?” asked the Protectron. “It. Feels. Like. YESTER. Day. When. You Lot. First.Started. Now. HERE.you are. All. Experienced.Even You. MICK. Bell. I’ll. Get. You. Soon .”

Mickbell and Kuro attempted to ignore him. Kuro especially because there’s something about seeing a fully mechanical being is especially upsetting. Mickbell, because he thinks someone programmed Del to be racist to synths.

Kabru, completely ignored this, but he wasn’t unaware of what Del said. It was just a reminder that he needed to find a programmer to iron out that weird little dud. Perhaps put a kibosh on Del going on a bigoted rampage.

“We’re not that experienced, Del,” said Kabru. “We’re just lucky, is all.”

“Lucky? That. Might. Be. True,” said Del. “It. Seems. All. the. BIG. Groups. Are. Fall. Ing. Apart. Folks. Going. Missing.” 

If Del had eyes, they would be focused on Mickbell like he did something.

“Per. Haps. You. Will. Unravel. The. Secrets. Of. The. Cave?” suggested Del.

“Us?” said Kabru, feigning humility. “Nah, we’re just prospectors like everybody else. Just looking to rake in some caps from whatever we bring in.”

Rin huffed, immediately signaling to Kabru that they needed to get the lead out. 

“Ah,” said Kabru. “Could we get some to-go jars for all this? Put it on my tab.” 

“Right. Away,” said Del, stomping away.

When he was out of the audio processor shot, Rin turned to Kabru.

“You know you didn’t have to play along with the machine, right?” she said. 

“Eh?” asked Kabru, playing dumb.

“We’re going to figure out what’s up with the cave, come Hell or high water,” said Rin.

“And the water’s getting pretty high,” said Mickbell, his head cocked in the vague direction of the coast. 

“Talk’s cheap, guys,” said Kabru. “We’ll demonstrate our mettle to this whole island. That’s worth more caps than anything we could say to Del. Kuro, and Mick, could you go gather Holm and Daya and meet us at the entrance? Rin and I will resupply. I want to go deeper than before.” 

Rin bought a week’s worth of rations from a supplier on The Edge and Kabru bought a few more rounds for his rifle. Lord bless this iron and make my aim true. 

They met back up at the mouth of the cave as instructed. Kabru, the human with sharp eyes and a silver tongue. Rin, a human doctor with a psyker mutation. Daya, a human boxer, and former guard. Then there was Holm, a Trog researcher associated with the followers of the apocalypse. Mickbell, synthetic thief and poisoner. Then there was Kuro the cyberdog, the best boy.

Kabru’s party was among the more accomplished groups on the island. They’d been doing their work steadily since they met on the island with no hiccups or interpersonal conflicts disrupting things.

Kuro reeled his head back as Mickbell scratched his head. Even though there were no nerves on the dome that covered his brain, Kuro’s robotic tail wagged wildly as he received scritches.

“In the deepest parts of the cave,” began Mickbell to the dog, “the worst thing that can happen to a body is running out of food. Worse than running into a deathclaw.” 

He hefted a bag of supplies onto his back and looked deep into the black expanse before him. Inside he imagined a whole universe devoid of stars. A night sky where there wasn’t any sign of hope. 

“It’s only a week’s worth of food and it already feels so heavy,” he complained. “How can people be down there for months like this?” 

A wicked smile stretched over Kabru’s face and he grabbed Mick’s shoulder, “They stay down there and they hunt wayward prospectors that wander near them.” 

Mickbell jumped, punctuating it with a loud, “Fuck!” 

“I just feel like it would be easier to hunt the monsters down there than it would people,” suggested Holm.

“That would be equally insufferable,” said Kabru as they set off downstairs into the hungry maw of the cave.

---

Rin’s mind was always buzzing it seemed. On account of how her body had been mutated by the wasteland, there was always this light buzz that seemed to run along her nervous system and dance in her brain. A light buzz that could cut and burn.As they wandered down the lower levels of the cave, far past any point they’d been before they encountered a horde of ferals. 

Electricity buzzed along her arms and whipped out from every point of her being. Flash-frying ghouls with little effort and casting the whole room in blue. It had once been an office. Did these used to be workers? How long had they been down here in the cave? How long were they like this before becoming feral?

Kabru fired off two shots the second they came across the horde. Blam. Blam. Two heads popped like gore balloons. Two more nightmares that the party wouldn’t have to deal with.

“Is everyone alright?” he called out after they’d dispatched the remainder of the horde. 

Everyone sounded off in the dark as Holm produced a flashlight, casting it around to make sure they didn’t leave a ghoul alive.

“Yep,” said a high-pitched computerized voice from Kuro.

“I am also fine,” said Daya.

“Good,” said Kabru, smiling at his group. “We’re making good progress on a level we’ve never been to. But we mustn’t get cocky now.” 

“I’ve heard that things have been getting weird on these levels,” offered Daya. “Parties are fighting more, structures and pathways are changing or vanishing. Visions made flesh?” 

“That’s suitably vague,” said Mickbell, he was crouched down going through the pockets of one of the ghouls. 

When he was done looting the corpse, he produced a box and opened it up, hoping to find something of value. It was full of loose pre-war change. Instead, he whipped the box at a window, shattering the glass and sending the box flying down.

“Slim pickings,” he said.

The box tumbled endlessly, shattering into a billion pieces even in the deepest depths along the length of the sunken building.

“Nothing good?” offered Holm, his long, clawed fingers running along the warm metal shell of Marillier.

“Scrat-” began Mickbell, but he was suddenly cut off by a cry of pain as a dart hit him in the neck, sending him to the ground. “Son of a bitch!” 

“Heretics! How dare you destroy the spawn of Atom!” shouted a voice in the dark. 

Kabru raised his rifle and aimed in the direction of the voice. Without a single word,  he illuminated the dark with muzzle flashes. 

The speaker was a Child of Atom, dressed in green robes, his face painted with a green atomic warning symbol. Or at least it was until Kabru’s fire turned his head into spaghetti meat. 

Holm deployed Marillier. The Liberator robot’s legs sprung out and it scuttled towards the sound of another moving around in the dark. It made a horrible chittering sound as it found the target. The robot slashed open her ankle with a long spike on one of its little legs, sending them down to the ground and making repeated work of stabbing her neck while she screamed. 

For his trouble, Holm caught a dart to the chest and fell back. His body immediately felt the strain and weakness brought on by whatever was filling the dart. 

“They’re poisoned,” He managed to get out before collapsing against a wall. 

Electricity crackled around Rin again, providing proper light to the room. It was down to her, Kabru, and Kuro. And Marieller, she supposed. But she found that she didn’t quite care for the robot. 

One of the cultists, seeing his fallen sister sprinted over and delivered a kick. The force sent the robot hurtling past the remaining party members with all the grace of a soccer ball. The crowd cheered GOAAALLL!

Rin raised her hand and hit him with a blast of lightning. His eyes flashed with blue energy for a brief second. His cheeks became inflated and then burst, fat and skin melting away before giving into a charred skeleton in seconds. 

Kabru too caught a dart to the neck from another whose chest he pumped full of lead. Deadman’s trigger in action as he collapsed to the ground. Following that, they got Kuro. 

“Oh shit,” she said, as she was left with the final member of the opposing party.

Darts, five of them fired out and caught her in the chest. Her vision went blurry. Her mind swam like she was catching that last little bit of time before falling asleep. 

---

The Touden party rounded a bend and found a grizzly scene at the end of it. A few charred skeletons were laid up against the wall, while beside them were slaughtered children of Atom. On the opposite side of the room was another group. Above them, they caught a living Child of Atom with a Syringer Rifle slung across his back, hunched over the body of a woman, going through her clothes and backpack. 

That’s all the motivation Marcille needed to draw her rifle and send a beam of energy through his chest. 

“What an absolute mess,” said Senshi as he stepped over bodies and over to the body of the woman. He felt around her neck and plucked the darts out of her chest.

 He a light, rhythmic throbbing in her neck, “She’s still alive.”

Marcille joined him across the room, followed close behind by Laios and Chil. Each of them found bodies. Each of them was met with similar results. 

Laios breathed a sigh of relief, “I’m not crazy about the other corpses…but they for sure deserved it.”

“Real empathic of you, Laios,” said Marcille, fresh blood on her hands aside.

“Sometimes it has to be done,” he shrugged. “Back east there’s quite a few Children of Atom settlements. They don’t have a problem with going to other settlements and poisoning the water with radioactive waste.”

Chilchuck nodded, “There’s often no reasoning with them. They’re little more than crazed zealots with rotten brains.”

“It’s a damned shame it has to come to this,” said Senshi. “I’ve been down here a long time and I’ve seen these folks around. Mostly keeping to themselves. I can’t understand what drove them to attack these folks.”

“It’s the same shit as usual,” said Chilchuck. “Desperation. Probably looking for loot or food. You saw him going through her bag, I bet it’s stuffed with camp lunches and meat.” 

“It’s what would happen if we weren’t eating the monsters,” said Laios. 

In any other setting, his head would be illuminated by the most annoying halo of light and positivity. Instead, he was only illuminated by the light of his Pip-Boy. 

[Marcille Hated That]

“We should probably heal them up,” she said. “If I were to guess, I'd say that the darts are coated with Morphine. Laios, Senshi. Help me lay them out in rows.” 

The boys helped her move their unconscious bodies into rows; Rin, Kabru, Holme, Mickbell, and Kuro. All in that order.

Marcille looked over her medical supplies and winced, “Damn, I don’t have enough Stimpaks.”

“Do you know how to make healing powder?” asked Senshi.

Marcille moved her hand from side to side to indicate an, “Eh.” 

Senshi sat down with his legs crossed and began to set up a tiny fire and a grill. 

He produced a cutting board, knife,  a Xander root, dried Broc Flower leaves, and a handful of Doktor leaves. He found a jar and filled it with water, placing it on the grill. 

He passed the leaves to Marcille and said, “You need to try to get those ground as fine as you can manage. I’ve not made it into a proper powder, but if it's finely chopped it will  make a good tea.”

She nodded. For the first time in the journey, she wasn’t profoundly upset about something Senshi was cooking. She began to chop the leaves into small strips and the roots into cubes. She emptied the results into the jar and they all watched as the mix boiled and became a brown color.

“If made properly,” said Senshi. “It should be sweet. But I’ve made it incorrectly and the result turned out kind of like rotten nuka cola.”

“Probably won’t matter too much what it tastes like, they are unconscious,” said Marcille.

“Fair point,” said Chilchuck

After two minutes, Senshi emptied the liquid into a separate jar using a fork as a strainer. It didn’t catch everything, but what leaves went through shouldn’t hinder things.

“It’s ready!” Senshi announced, his voice thundering like a trio of trumpets.

Healing Powder Tea

1 can of purified water (boiled)

1 Broc Flower (chopped)

6 Doktor Leaves (chopped)

1 Xander Root (chopped into cubes.)

Serves 5-6

+18 Health

-2 Perception

+3 Strength

One by one, Senshi helped the bodies of Kabru’s party up, gently pouring portions of the warm, saccharine-smelling tea past their lips. He did have to rub their throats like when you give a dog medicine, but otherwise, it went down easy for each of them. 

When wandering around in the dark of the cave. You must remember the most important lesson of the wasteland; it’s a lesson taught to the world by a wise sage centuries ago. Look for the helpers. You mustn’t let yourself yourself fall into the pit of desperation. It takes forever to surface from it. You won’t be the same person you were when you fell.

Chapter Text

The next section they ended up in was flooded. An underground lake with a surface littered with rocky outcrops and the remains of boats where others tried and failed to cross. So far, it looked promising to Laios. Save for one thing: Fish.

Nightmare fish with fish like wings leapt out of the water, slamming into faces and torsos. Knocking Chilchuck into the ground as the fish helplessly flopped around. Turns out, that after leaping out, they were helpless.

Laios picked one up, examining it. It wasn’t anything special. It wasn’t even all that mutated save for having four eyes than the typical two. Otherwise it was your average Cypselurus californicus, the California Flying Fish. 

His mouth flattened as he looked at the thing as it flopped about in his hand, slowly choking on the air. Meanwhile, Marcille beamed. Finally, they’d have a normal meal rather than some kind of hideous monster from the depths of the cave. 

“There must be some kind of a tunnel that leads from the cave out to the ocean. I’ve not seen these guys this far inland,” commented Laios.

Senshi and Chilchuck began to gather up the fish and place them in a basket. 

“I’ve always called them bladefish,” said Senshi, picking one out of the basket and pulling one of its fin wings out, “See how it’s flat and curved like a hunting knife?” 

“I can kind of see that,” said Marcille. “I used to eat them all the time when I was studying with the followers in San Francisco.” 

“It’s just,” Laios shrugged and moved his hand from side to side in a ‘so-so’ fashion.

“Are  you mad because it’s boring?” said Chilchuck, fixing him with a half lidded glare.

“I…kinda. I also think fish is kind of gross,” said Laios.

[Marcille fucking hated that]

Marcille stared at him, ceasing her conversation with Senshi immediately, “Are you fucking serious? Out of all the awful things we’ve eaten, you suddenly draw the line at something because it’s boring and ‘gross’?”

Laios said nothing, because he knew that she’d read him to filth. 

“There’s a variety of ways to cook them,” began Senshi, ignoring both of them. “You can fry them, you can even eat them raw…raw…Sashimi.” 

He rubbed his chin with his thumb and forefinger. Chilchuck was surprised he could find it beneath the virile rug that made up his beard. 

“I’d feel more comfortable if we crossed the lake before we focused on cooking,” said Chilchuck. 

On the other side were the ruins of some kind of fortification made of cinderblocks and a tin roof. Then that left the issue of actually getting to it. 

“We could construct a raft, but we’d need something to act as a float,” said Marcille.

Laios got an idea. Marcille felt an itch in the back of her brain. He sat down his bag and stripped off his armor pieces until he was just in his hand-me down vault suit. That was also stripped off, revealing his Fat Man tiddies and muscular body. Everyone immediately looked away. Jiggle, jiggle, tig ol bitties.

“My vault suit is made out of rubber coated fibers,” he said and began to tie the arms and legs together. “If we find some way to block off the neck, we could use it as a flotation device. We could even stuff it with Chil’s wine corks.” 

“Hey!” he shouted.

“Have you been saving corks?” asked Marcille.

“You really ought not to be drinking at your age, it will kill brain cells that will stunt your moral and mental development,” said Senshi in a disappointed father tone. “Of course I have some too. I’m only human.”

[Chilchuck Hated That]

“I am thirty-five, physically,”  said Chilchuck. 

“You don’t save wine corks,” said Marcille. “They’re not like caps, you can’t use them to buy things.” 

Chilchuck dug in his bag and apprehensively brought out a sack of them, “Are you going to be judgy right now when we need them? Anyways, for the neck, we could bind it with duct tape.”

Senshi and Laios began to walk over to a half sunken boat on the edge of the lake. Muscles strained as they hefted the length of it onto the land. Both of them became slick with lake water. They shook their heads wildly to throw off some of the water. Chilchuck, despite his antipathy developed the most confusing erection in his life and hid it as he and Marcille filled Laios sweat drenched vault suit with cork before inflating it and patching the neck with duct tape. 

They fashioned an oar out of an old sign and some tape. Before long, the construction on the raft began and ended. They sat it out on the surface to see if it would sink before piling on. Again, Senshi and Laios were in command of the physicality. Both took the oar in their hands and began to steer it towards the fortification. 

[Chilchuck Loved That]

Before Chilchuck could fully daydream about Laios and Senshi as the first mate and captain of an old world sailing ship, the water erupted with a great splash, sending the boat back, but not swamping it. 

Something more than flying fish emerged from the depths. A swarm of Floaters emerged. Hideous beings with long, thin bodies, and heads that inflated and deflated, glowing a sickly green, brighter than the glowing fungus that lined the walls of the lake cave. 

“Hell yeah!” shouted Laios as he allowed Senshi to solely steer the boat. 

The young man drew his sword and aimed the tip at the amphibious horrors. 

They immediately descended upon the group with Chilchuck ducking down, immediately losing his erection as he was repeatedly grabbed at by disgusting monsters who tried to carry him away.

The raft was rocked from side to side, and Marcille missed most of her shots with her laser rifle. Laios slashed one in half and left its corpse in Senshi’s basket of fish. Marcille spotted this and knew immediately what was up.

“I hate this goddamn cave!” she shouted as she blasted one Floater into dust. 

They were right at the edge when they began to sink. Senshi was knocked into the water by a floater, dipping the corner of the raft into the water, the rest of them slid into the water and Laios, being the tallest, was the only one who was able to keep his head above before the others could emerge. The basket was gripped in his hands, high above his head.

The rest of the company grabbed onto Laios’ nearly naked form as he marched onto the other edge, Marcille, Senshi, and Chil collapsed on the shore, panting and hacking up disgusting salt water. The water burned their nostrils (or at least, in Marcille’s case, it would if she had them). She had to hack water through her noseless face hole. 

“Where’s Ambrosia?” she said, looking around to see if it had washed up. 

The Floaters that remained, seemed to lose interest before diving into the water. 

“Shit,” she said, looking down. She knew that their weapons were probably down there. 

“That puts a damper on things,” said Senshi.

[Everyone Hated That]

Chilchuck stood and stretched his back until it popped, “Okay. As per my contract, I will dive and get the stuff.” 

“Thank you, Chilchuck,” said Marcille.

“However,” he said, pointing up at Laios. “He has to come with me. I need a guard dog to keep away those things. I’m not dying down there. Not yet.” 

[Laios Loved That]

Chilchuck stripped out of his clothes and together the two dived down into the lake.

What if they just died and that’s how I concluded the story? What if Chilchuck and Laios just immediately drowned? I won’t do that, but I kind of want to. 

The water blurred the vision and stung their eyes, but beneath they spotted their stuff at the sunken remains of their raft. Chilchuck tapped his wrist and gestured at the deflated vault suit. He moved his balled up fists up to imitate the act of filling up a bag.

Laios thought he understood, but he wasn’t sure. So he imitated the action while his head was cocked to the side. 

Chilchuck scowled and used his arm to write out the word “bag” in the air…In the water. Laios nodded then and immediately got pounded hard by a Floater. Laios shot out a large breath and turned to punch the creature. Chil swam down heading towards the raft, all while Laios got swarmed by floaters. 

He unzipped the vault suit, cramming as much of their shit inside it before returning to Laios. He pulled out a hand grenade and tossed it over at them. In the fray, Laios swam it and swam down.

From the surface Senshi and Marcille saw the explosion and the blasted corpses of floaters rained down on them like the world’s most disgusting hailstorm. 

From the surface, Laios and Chilchuck emerged with a gasp. Chilchuck wrapped his arm around Laios neck as he doggy paddled back to the shore. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?!” shouted Senshi once they were back and safe.

“Get off my ass!” shouted Chilchuck. 

“You set off an explosive underwater,” he said. “That will throw off the whole chemical makeup of the lake, then there’s the mass death of these floaters. The whole ecosystem is lucky if it only gets temporarily disrupted.” 

Chilchuck waved that off before collapsing on the ground to catch his breath. Marcille unzipped the vault suit and retrieved her laser rifle. While Laios, still mostly naked, began to gather the more intact bodies of Floaters. 

Senshi began to set up a small fire with a wire cage overtop it. “Because of our dip in the lake, all of my rags are wet.” he said, placing the rag over the flame. 

While he did that, he set upon the bodies of the Floaters, while Marcille removed the scales of the fish. Senshi cut the tentacles off and cast them aside before slicing it open and pulling out the brain and other assorted internal organs. 

“They way I reckon,” he said “None of these organs should be particularly helpful to us, but it’s the soft flesh that will need attention, save for perhaps the liver,but it’s relatively small.” 

He pulled from his waterlogged bag a small jug of wine, he uncorked and poured a bit into his mouth. Even with his powerful beard, everyone could see the look of abject disgust that had overtaken him.

“Just as I suspected…it’s become vinegar…” he said. “Which is great for us because now we don’t have to fry these.” 

Chilchuck’s heart was immediately overtaken by a sense of mourning. It was like he’d lost a dear friend. But, that dear friend was a jug of wine that he’d never seen before that had turned sour. 

After removing the offending organs, they all watched as Senshi used his newly dried rag to pat the floater dry and repeated it with the fish that Marcille had descaled. The flesh of the fish was a pinkish-red, while the flesh of the floater turned out to be a darker green. Like Christmas, thought Marcille.

He poured the wine vinegar into a small bowl and plopped thin sliced Xander Root into the liquid. He did the fish first, slicing them thin and letting those thin slices soak into it, afterwards arranging the myriad of thin slices into multiple circles on a tin plate. 

Then he did the same with the Floaters. Arranging them in rows due to the limited number that they had resulting from the fight. 

“It’s ready!” he exclaimed, voice pounding out the two words like a drum.

Floater Sashimi

5 Floater corpses, fresh

2 cups of wine vinegar

½ thin sliced xander root. 

Serves 1-2

+2 strength

-4 endurance

+6 health

+6 rads

Bladefish Sashimi

8 Bladefish (Californian Flying Fish)

2 cups wine vinegar

½ thin sliced xander root.

Serves 3-4

+6 strength

+8 health

+7 rads

Laios was given the plate. None of the others fully trusted the sashimi (even Senshi, despite his gastronomic brilliance). Laios downed the full plate in minutes, sitting with his legs crossed while his vault suit dried on the side of a destroyed wall of the nearby fortification. 

“The flavor is very full, the vinegar mixes well with the oil in the fish,” said Marcille as she ate a rather generous portion of the bladefish sashimi. 

“I wish I was blackout drunk,” said Chilchuck as he sat and ate. The food didn’t taste bad, but the vinegar taste made him long for a nice big bottle of rosé . He’d take rosé at this point.

Laios stared down at his plate with the expression of a sad puppy dog. He wanted to like it, he really did…but the fish tasted good. The texture. It all felt wrong. He looked for his bag and took out a positively drenched book about wasteland cuisine. The Floater would not number among things he would try again as he tried not to tear a page with his pen.

Chapter Text

Laios gripped his stomach and laid on his side feeling like something was working through his guts with a knife. He could feel aspects of himself seizing and swelling wildly while Marcille ran a diagnostic. 

“I think he’s got a parasite,” she said. “Likely from that goddamn floater meat.” 

Laios would have answered, but he kept a tight grip on his midsection. He’d see his sister again soon enough. Overwhelming pain gripped him to the point where speech was impossible. 

The group would spend the night at the spot where he was laid down. Their sleep was often interrupted by him writhing in wordless pain and screaming to himself.

“If you think about it,” said Senshi as he cooked up some of the remaining Bladefish from the lake. “When we killed the floaters we likely killed the biggest predator the fish had to deal with. They’re feasting on the corpses of the floaters. The parasite in Laios’s guts is feeding on him…and we’ve all entered the great mystery of the cave’s ecosystem. Isn’t that just charming?” 

“Please God, I don’t want to die,” mumbled Laios. 

“You know,” said Marcille as she jabbed Laios in the belly with a stimpak. “This cave’s ecosystem is different from a lot of others. Probably because of all the human involvement in it, but it seems to take account of the wholesale slaughter of some of the creatures within. I studied things like this back when I was being trained by the Followers of the Apocalypse.” 

---

Marcille was young by ghoul standards. She sat in a dorm room set up in an old library which was at the time headed by a doctor from the Capital Wasteland named Jack Seward. She sat in her room taking apart and putting together her laser rifle, Ambrosia. 

She was a solitary figure like that, ignored by her fellow students primarily because she was the daughter of scientists and because she was a ghoul who’d risen to a high level despite only being at Seward’s school for a week. 

There was a knock on the door and a human girl stood there, her skin seemingly untouched and unblemished by the harder living of the wastes. Uncooked by radiation, unlike Marcille. 

“Is everything alright?” she asked.

“Yess’m,” said Falin. “I’ve gotten a bit lost looking for my dorm. 312.”

The girl was constantly squinting and Marcille immediately concluded that she was half blind without some kind of glasses. 

“This is room 312…I guess you’re my new roommate. I think Doctor Seward mentioned you, Falin, right?” said Marcille, who had gotten used to living alone in the week she’d been there.

“Synchronicity!” said Falin. “I knew I was in the right area.” 

Marcille let her in and the girl flopped onto the bed just adjacent to her own. 

“What do you mean by synchronicity?” asked Marcille.

“Eh?” the girl sat up. “Sometimes I just get a vibe and I know that’s exactly where I need to be, y’know?” 

“No,” she replied.

“It’s like…smaller than a thought, but bigger than an emotion, it’s a vibration, a full seismic thing, but it’s pure coincidence too,” she said, trying to articulate the thought with her hands by flapping them up and down. “So what are you studying?”

“...That’s a difficult question to answer,” she said. “Right now I’m doing a bit of engineering, a bit of medicine, a bit of sociology.” 

“Nice. I’m doing medicine with some focus on safe corpse disposal practices,” she said. “It’s what I was doing back at my home settlement before I was shipped off here.”

“Shipped off?” asked Marcille. 

“Yeah, my father didn’t want me around the Vault and the crypts so he sent me west with a caravan. But I like it here so far…mostly.” 

“I’m terribly sorry, that seems callous,” she said. 

“That’s just how it is,” she said before standing up. “I’m also studying local ecosystems…Wanna see?”

---

Their walk took them to the woods that had begun to regrow in California in the years following the bombs. The woods are a mess of infinite horrors. An hour-long gunfight between the girls and some chem-addled scavs ended with them victorious. Falin managed to land clean shots on each one. Marcille at the time chalked it up to luck, this was before she educated herself on the finer points of VATS. 

Their path ended with a sack full of wild mutfruit and a shared song in their hearts. Together they stood at the foot of a cave and waited for the other to make the first move. Falin was ultimately the first to take the plunge, followed close behind by Marcille. 

The human led her into a great antechamber, ending at a rocky outcropping that overlooked an anthill in the middle of the floor. The ants were ignorant of the voyeurs above as they did their work. 

“It’s all very beautiful, Falin, but I've seen ant colonies before,” said Marcille in a whisper.

She wasn’t ready for the goddamned cazadors. Great wasps of incredible size flew out of a hole in the top portion of the cave, flying down and attacking the ants. Some landed and began to eat the ants, while others did something that Marcille had only ever read about in books of pre-war insects, she watched as a wasp seized the body of a slain ant and began to rip into its exoskeleton to lay its eggs. 

“Holy shit,” she whispered. “This is incredible.” 

“I know,” said Falin. “I’ve been coming here for a few weeks watching this happen. The cazadors seldom slaughter more ants then the colony can’t afford to lose. But, I’ve also noticed that when the wasps leave, the ants will exit and eat some of the eggs from the corpses of their fellow colonists. Effectively both species, even though one isn’t native to the area keep each other in check. That’s why there haven’t been many attacks on the local settlements.”

Marcille took a piece of mutfruit and bit into it, sweet juice dripping down her chin. All the sweeter for being with Falin. All the sweeter for both of them being alive to enjoy it, while beneath them ants and cazadors fought each other to live.

---

Marcille concluded her tale with Chil wondering if the mutfruit was meant to be allegorical in a different direction than talking about the sweetness of life paired with death. 

Laios continued to struggle in pain as parasites lived, died, and ripped up his innards.

Chapter Text

Chilchuck took out a rudimentary map of the cave and gestured at an area featuring a large rough antechamber, then his fingers cut across the strip of paper to another section. 

“Here is where we are now,” he said before his fingers motioned back to the first position. “And here’s where the mutants said that the deathclaw was. We should reach it in two days. If we’re lucky it should be there still and we can finish off the bastard.” 

He stood up and extended his fingers out, looking ominous in the light of his candle. “We should only make camp twice before we reach it. Once at the midway point and once right before it.  So, everyone get ready our next break won’t be for a good long while.” 

Marcille raised her hand and said, “I want to wash up.” 

“Where?” asked Chil. 

“I’ll just do it around the corner,” she said.

“Fine, but make it quick. Laios is healthy enough to move and we should be fine from here. We’ll wait outside. 

Senshi and Chil left the room, dragging Laios’ still alive, but corpselike body out into an adjacent tunnel. Marcille missed when the gender ratio of the group was equal. She missed Falin, especially, but she would not deny that it was nice having Namari too. Namari and Shuro were supposed to be their comrades and they dropped the party like it was nothing. 

She couldn’t help but think of that as she aggressively rubbed at her skin with some boiled water and dish soap. When she was done, she couldn’t help but pour the remains of her bathing water into the lake. 

Water beneath swirled and all of a sudden there was a great ball of flying fish, all circling like nothing she’d ever seen before. Individual bladefish flew out and slammed into her chest, knocking the wind out of her as she fell.

Senshi and Chil emerged from around the corner to witness the scene happening to Marcille as she ducked and dived around outcrops of brickwork to avoid the fish as best she could. 

“What happened?!” shouted Chilchuck. 

“I don’t know, I didn’t think the fish acted like this!” she shouted back. 

Chilchuck dived back into the room and began to smack Laios back into consciousness. Laios’s bloodshot eyes opened up and he was faced by Chilchuck. 

“What’s going on?” he asked. 

“Your little wasteland survival guide, does it say anything about bladefish forming into a giant flying ball?!” shouted the synth.

“I read somewhere that it comes from a harsh change to their environment, but not how to combat them,” he said.

Chilchuck growled. 

Meanwhile, Marcille was screaming as she fired at the mass of fish and water using her laser rifle. 

“Why! Why! WHY!?” she shouted as she managed to pepper the individual fish, but did nothing to kill the main body of it. 

“Marcille!” shouted Chil. “Run back here, get over here!” 

She wasn’t about to argue with him as wave after wave of fish commenced their kamikaze attack on her, slamming their bodies into her as she fled into the adjacent hallway.

The hallway was connected to the body of a towering building like an old-world skyscraper, but none of them had the energy or desire to take that in. 

Marcille was worn and tired and outside the ball of fish and water continued to swirl, sitting right in the way of their escape. 

Senshi and Laios, now at peak energy began to grill up the fish that had slammed against the body of the tower, the smell of food wafting up into the higher portions of the building right where Namari and her new party could smell it. 

“What kind of moron would grill meat in a place like this?” she asked.

“What?” asked Mister Tansu.

“Do you smell something?” offered Kaka. Then the smell hit him too. “It’s…fish, someone’s grilling something down below.” 

He readied his silenced rifle as did his sister, “Could be a raider party.”

Chapter Text

There isn’t a good god living in the tunnels and the rat-ways of the cave. The Tansu party, composed of two elderly trogs, their human children, and Namari cleared out room after room in the building before ending up on the ground floor, weapons drawn on the strange party and their slick grill setup.

Chilchuck’s sensitive synthetic ears could pick up the sounds of their footsteps and he informed the party of the slowly ascending adventurers. 

The Touden party could see human-ish shapes in the stairwell and raised their hands, “We aren’t raiders if that’s we’re just prospectors.” 

“Laios?” called out Namari as she stepped into the light cast by their fire. 

“Friends of yours?” croaked Tansu.

“Yeah, we used to be in the same party together,” said Namari as they all gathered on the floor below. She cast her attention over to Laios. “Long time no see.”

“It’s only been a week,” said Laios. 

“Let me introduce you. The trogs are Mister and Misses Tansu, they’re scholars working for the mayor’s office. Kiki and Kaka are the twins over there.” 

She gestured rather proudly at the assembled group.

“Namari…” hissed Marcille. 

The twins readied their weapons, assuming the worst of the ghoul. 

“How dare you abandon Falin?” she growled.

“Abandon? You asked me to join on a dangerous mission and I refused,” she said haughtily. 

“You,” Marcille collapsed on her face. 

“You need to rest,” said Laios. 

“Do you have a doctor in your group at all?” asked Laois. “We’d like to request some healing for our bud.” 

“What will I get in return?” asked Mister Tansu, singling himself out as a healer of some status. 

Laios looked around, as he’d be diagnosed terminally broke by Tansu’s slight glance. 

“We have bladefish,” he offered. 

Tansu snarled, “I’m not some primordial beast, I’m not eating some random fish!” 

He turned his back on Laios, “Let us depart, Namari. Doling out charity in this place is just asking for trouble.”

Laios put his hand on the little creature’s shoulder and stopped him, “wait. Are you going on ahead? The fish have formed into some kind of ball and are attacking.” 

“Hrm?” he asked. “Now I get it. You angered a water spirit.” 

The trog smiled and exposed a mouth of wicked teeth, “Don’t underestimate us. We’ve lived in harmony with the spirits of the old and the new world since the bombs first fell.”

“They’re like neighbors to us,” said Mrs Tansu. 

They stepped out towards the water and watched as the ball of fish rose out of the water, an undulating mass of swirling things. 

“Great spirit of the water!” called out Mr Tansu. 

The fish ball did not heed his call. A blast of fish flew from it and slammed across Namari’s face, blood sprayed across the wall from her wound. 

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she shouted as Kaka dragged her back into the safety of the building. His sister did the same for their father. 

They laid her down on the floor and Tansu produced a handful of stimpaks, a bit of alcohol, and a staple gun. 

“Don’t struggle!” he commanded as he administered the drugs and began to staple the wound across her face shut. 

“Damn you you old bastard!” she hissed with every ker-chunk of the staple gun. “You always use me as a shield!” 

“That’s what I’m paying you for!” 

“You’re studying something down here,” asked Laios. “What is it?” 

“If you must know, it’s a recovery mission. We’re looking for pre-war documents and books,” said Mister Tansu.

“If I help you, will you heal our friend?” asked 

Heaven was a tower, a tower tethered in its pride, cast grapes so sour, sour. Hellish gardens flowered ivy to be climbed. The adjacent tower that rested low beneath in the depths of the cave was wrapped in thick vines that were prickly to the touch. 

“Corpse Cabbage,” as Laios defined it.

 Tansu decided to read the graffiti on the walls. It was in an old language, not exactly English. Perhaps something else. Laios couldn’t make anything of it. 

“It’s an older script,” said Tansu. “The handwriting is nearly illegible. The vines are in the way, take care of them.” 

The muscle of the party, the twins, Laios, and Namari were hacking their way down a flight of stairs, trying to get through the dense wall of corpse cabbage tentacles

Corpse Cabbage doesn’t grow this way above ground. Too many predators exist to nip at it. But below, in the sprawling depths of the cave, it can grow unmolested, its tentacles of it becoming covered in barbs to further protect it from those who’d wish to get at its succulent green flesh.

What the group didn’t know…was that there’s a peculiar sort of awareness that comes when the bulb of the corpse cabbage flowers. 

Kiki was seized around the waist and drawn up into the writhing mass of tentacles to be left for dead. 

“Merciful spirits, it’s alive!” shouted Mrs Tansu. “Kiki! Kiki! Are you alright!” 

“What are you standing around for?” asked Mr Tansu. “Kill it!” 

“Our weapons can’t reach up there!” she shouted back at the old bastard.

“Well, hurry up and do something!” 

Laios, thinking fast grabbed his homemade longsword and started tugging at the fines, eventually goading them into hefting him up. He found Kiki in the rafters, flailing as the corpse cabbage’s paralyzing stingers began to take hold, but they couldn’t cut through the thick fabric of his vault suit. 

He made like Butcher Pete and hacked, whacked, and chopped. Slicing open enough of the vines until they become slack, but they wouldn’t release. Gradually the vines began to ensnare his neck. Above him rested the bulb of the plant. 

“Namari!” he shouted. “Aim for the bulb!” he said, still trying to chop the two of them free even as the paralyzing toxin made his lips swell and sting. 

Namari seized Kiki’s crossbow and swore under her breath. God guide my aim to be true. God guide my aim to be true! The bot flew from the crossbow, missing Laios’s swollen face by a hair, and plunged into the bulb of the corpse cabbage. 

The two were sent falling to the floor, their faces scarred and swollen from the fall. Laios’s body remained wrapped in the vines as they were dragged off to the campsite. 

Tansu, recalling his deal set right to work on Marcille, stitching up wounds and injecting her with stimpaks that worked their delicate medicinal magic. 

Laios sat down and started to slowly break off the dying corpse cabbage vines. 

Namari took a knife and began to cut off the limbs. Senshi saw an opportunity and picked them up with a knife of his own, taking them to his pot for a new recipe. 

“You all said that you don’t care for wasteland food,” said Senshi. “Might you be partial to a tea?” 

Tansu looked up from his patient and then to his wife. “A tea might be excellent.”

With a hand wrapped in fabric, Senshi began to slice open the tentacles of the plant, placing them in a pot of boiling water and then straining the green liquid into several jars. 

Corpse Cabbage Tea:

8 Corpse Cabbage Limbs, sliced thin

8 cans of water (three dirty). 

Serves 4-8

+8 hit points

+1 stamina

Marcille drank deep in the jar of hot tea offered to her. The taste was semi-sweet despite not having any sweeteners in it. Meanwhile, Laios and Namari were discussing the events of her rescue of him and Kiki. 

“You’ve become a better sharpshooter than before,” he said. “I didn’t know you knew how to use a crossbow.” 

“Oh I fully don’t,” she said. “That was all dumb luck.” 

An image of Namari accidentally shooting him flashed across his eyes. 

It was Marcille’s turn to confront their former comrade. She weakly got up, moving slowly to not strain the stitches. 

“I suppose I should thank you for helping,” she said coldly. 

“You’re very welcome,” said Namri. “I find it so much easier to work when I get paid for it.” 

The two locked eyes and would have gone at each other like a pair of rabid pit bulls if not interrupted by Laios. 

“Now, now,” he said. “Let’s not get upset about things that are over and done with.”

“Nothing about this is over!” shouted Marcille, more at Laios than anyone else. 

“Why aren’t you the least big concerned!” shouted Namari, also at Laios.

Chapter Text

“Frankly,” said Mister Tansu. “I’ve never seen fish behave this way. It’s profoundly upsetting in ways that are difficult to articulate.” 

“It’s a miracle that you can articulate at all,” quipped Marcille as she got to her feet, and the group all looked out at the swirling mass of fish that continued to float above the underground late. Occasionally, it would dip down under and return to floating there, waiting for someone to make a move outside.

“Quite,” said Mister Tansu. “But we best be getting on. I’ve secured my end of the deal. Come, Namari.”

Mister Tansu dug his long fingers into his backpack and pulled out a relay grenade. 

“Hang on,” said Namari. “These guys are…Well, I guess they used to be my coworkers, but they’re good people. There has to be something we can do to help them.” 

“She’s right,” said Kiki. “Until that thing’s dead, they’re functionally stuck here.”

“What would you suppose we do?” asked Tansu.

“How many shooters does your group have?” asked Laios.

Mrs. Tansu produced an old AEP7 laser pistol while Namari displayed her revolver. So, that left Marcille, Kiki, and Chil with his.22, though they all had limited ammunition from the other firefights. 

“If you’re lucky,” said Mr. Tansu. “You should be able to scavenge components for more ammunition once you reach The Town.”

“Well,” said Laios. “The way I figure it. We could concentrate fire on the fish after luring them into the building…then trap them in Senshi’s pot…then presto, seafood boil.”

“You motherfucker! Are you really thinking about food right now?” said Marcille. 

To this, Laios nodded.

She growled at him. 

The shooters lined up outside and began firing everything they had at the floating ball at fish, and sure enough, it came flying in. 

The thing about a flying ball of fish is that it’s stronger than you. It flew in close to the group and began slamming into them. It took Namari and Senshi running up to it with the pot and its lid.

The fish flew up for a second, taking the two of them off their feet, but they were pulled down by Laios, who helped bring the pot towards the fire.

It didn’t take long for the boil to commence.  

The fish eventually stopped thrashing about in the pot and when the lid was lifted, the entire tower was treated to the pungent and salty aroma of somewhere in the ballpark of 10 bladefish being boiled. 

Senshi’s Bladefish Boil

10 Bladefish 

The equivalent to 8 cans of boiled radioactive water

5 corpse cabbage tentacles.

Serves 10.

+10 hit points

- 4 agility

+ 10 rads.

It was the first meal that Laios abstained from. Just being near Senshi’s cooking pot was enough to make the geiger counter on his Pip-Boy click like crazy. Chilchuck, being a synth, was unaffected by the radiation. Marcille smiled as she could feel the radioactive properties of the boil. This was the case for nearly everyone. Only Laois, Kiki, and Kaka didn’t touch the food. While Namari and Senshi sucked on Radaway while dining. 

“Have you guys been eating like this the entire time since I left?” she asked, taking a bit out of one of the radioactive fish.

“That’s right,” nodded Laios. 

The Tansu’s sat their bowls down and approached Namari, their heads held low and expressions solemn. 

“Now that all of this nasty business has concluded,” began Mrs. Tansu. “We’re heading back to the surface.” 

Mr. Tansu nodded in agreement. “You can stay here if you wish.”

“Not a chance,” said Namari. “Believe it or not, I do wish to be in your party, sir. You might not get it, but I do want to be with you guys and help beyond just the caps. Now finish your soup, old man.”

The group continued eating together, and Namari focused on Chilchuck next. “I always figured you’d be the first to leave when things got as hairy as they did. You’re the kind of guy that doesn’t do anything that isn’t a paying gig.”

Chil nodded, “That’s why I don’t do things unless I’m paid in advance. I’ve had to many fuckups that have left me broke.”

“Wait,” said Marcille. “So you’re only here because you’ve already been paid?! Not because we’re  your friends and comrades!?”

“Calm down,” said Chilchuck, producing a broken cigarette and lighting it. He blew the smoke into the air and focused on her now. “Marcille, let me tell you something I’ve learned. Don’t trust people who say they’re not there for a reward. Those are the real lunatics you have to watch out for.”

“What’s Shuro up to these days?” asked Laios.

“Dunno,” said Namari. “I heard he’s got other connections now. He was so into Falin that I think her loss has him all torn up. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up down here looking for her, too.” 

“That’s news to me,” said Marcille bitterly.

“He should have come with us; we could have used the extra help,” said Laios sadly. 

“Look, you guys,” said Namari. “I know recovering Falin’s body is important to you; just make sure that you make it back in once piece yourselves.” 

“You too, Namari,” said Marcille. “Be careful out there.”

The groups departed as equals, the Tansu group vanished in a cloud of smoke and electrical sparks that made Chilchuck’s hair stand on end.

Chapter Text

The stairs twisted around and down, deeper underground and deeper still into the horrible darkness that awaited them. All lined with more and more vast corpse cabbage vines and other stinging plants of a less sentient nature. 

“Are you sure this is the right way?” asked Chil as they stood at the mouth of the entrance. 

“Should be,” said Laios, glancing down at the little map that the Super Mutants had given them. He needed to remember to transfer that into his Pip-Boy. “They should lead us down to the fifth level, near where they set up camp before.”

It didn’t take long before they got down; Laios and Senshi were at the head of the group. 

“This is fantastic,” said Laios. “Look at all of these different plants.”

“I think them muties pulled a fast one on us,” bitched Chilchuck. “There’s no way they could come through here and not have disturbed all of this.”

“I don’t know,” said Laios. “It does connect to their settlement. Makes sense why they’d want to keep us out.” 

“I think it’ll save us time and energy if we found a different way,” said Marcille, though nobody listened.

Senshi and Laios were too busy hacking, whacking, and chopping away. 

“Don’t get too close to the walls,” said Chichuck. “For all we know, these walls could be hollow and full of all sorts of nasty little traps. There’s little reason for the growth of plants like this other than hollow places where traps or other horrors could be. It makes things a real pain in the ass.”

They barely got through the plants before getting down to a section that was a field of them. Corpse cabbage tentacles stretched up to the ceiling, and unknown to all of them, they were being scrutinized by several sets of inhuman eyes. 

A creature larger than a man but smaller than a deathclaw emerged from the long field of tentacles and began to rush, bowling into Senshi and Laios, knocking them into the walls.

“Goddamn gulpers!” shouted Chilchuck. 

“Disgusting,” shouted Marcille as she opened fire at the monster, only for another to leap out and seize her gun and leap away. 

Chilchuck looked around and noticed that a tentacle was stuck in a wall, and then he looked to Laios, “Why don’t the tentacles seem to hurt the gulpers at all?”

“I dunno,” he said rather flippantly. “That’s just how their skin works?” 

Chil took a knife and crept underneath a gulper, slicing open its belly and pulling the skin off to make crude gloves. With that, he seized the loose tentacle and began to tug, and tug, and tug. 

As he pulled, the other gulper ran up on him and seized him in its slimy maw. Everyone screamed and screamed as he continued to hang onto the tentacle with his seeming death grip.

  The monster pulled and loosed the tentacle from its hole, activating something in the wall that caused some jury-rigged trap to set off. A panel opened up, and a crude crossbow fell out. a bolt came loose and pierced the gulper in the forehead.

The monstrous animal fell dead, and the group found that Chilchuck was not with it as they’d assumed briefly. He was flailing but unable to escape from it. 

They seized him by the legs and began to tug him free. The synth’s eyes were wide, and he was hacking up slime. “The, the insides, they’re like an endless wall of human fingers!” 

They ignored that and looked at his hands, completely unhurt by the stinging vines of the corpse cabbage tentacle.

“You used it like gloves to protect your hands,” said Laios. “This…this is a brilliant idea.” 

Chilchuck looked up at him and gave him a half-hearted thumbs up. Laios walked over to the gulper that the trap had slain and laid it out in it’s back.

“First, slice up the belly,” he said, cutting up using a hunting knife and making a Y-insion. “Then skin the gulper.” 

He peeled off the creature’s mottled green and brown skin like he was removing a fancy lady’s coat, revealing sticky pink meat beneath. 

“Wait a sec,” began Marcille, but she was interrupted by Senshi.

“For the tentacles, peel and boil the thicker parts, mash them up, and mix them with flour,” he said. “Press them into little balls and mash them with a fork just slightly.” 

He sat his pot down and started a fire, the resulting water beginning to boil. 

“Then boil them,” he said.

“Hang the skins of the gulpers,” said Laios. “Just to dry.” 

“Add oil, chili peppers, and the like,” said Senshi, frying ingredients in a pan on a hot plate. “Then you add the meat from the gulpers legs.” 

The meat came out in little pink chunks of muscle and fat that fried up with a faintly fishy smell. Though not quite so fishy as the bladefish boil. 

“Measure, and begin to cut,” said Laios, measuring out Chil’s proportions. 

Before long, both had presented their creations that made Marcille gag. For Laios, it was a set of gulper skin body suits, and for Senshi, it was a bowl of gulper leg gnocchi. 

Gulper Leg Gnocci

8 Gulper Thighs

6 Corpse Cabbage Tentacles

Peppers to taste

Radaway drizzle

-6 radiation

+2 Strength

+6 Stealth. 

“You’re both so goddamn ridiculous!” shouted Marcille. “You both barely even stopped to breath before setting about with this absurd shit!”

“Don’t be like that,” said Laios. “Just try it on.” 

“Yes, yes,” said Senshi. “Eat up and become big and strong.” 

“I’m not wearing that, Laios,” said Marcille.

The boys conferred with one another, including the still moderately shell shocked Chilchuck.

They then turned back to hear, and Laios said, “Marcille, if you wear this, we all think you would look really cute.” 

Marcille grimaced and threw own the suit of wet and heavy mutated salamander skin. She could feel it begin to cling to her clothes underneath, and the others also set out to do the same. Even Chilchuck, whose outfit mostly consisted of him in a bag with a pair of loose, sloppy slacks. 

“It’s so neat how the tiny eye parts stick out to make us have little ears,” said Laios.

“Don’t ever speak to me again,” said Marcille as they trudged unharmed through the field of tentacles, all the while eating Senshi’s pasta. They picked up the weapons lost during the skirmish and kept on moving. The path turned and twisted, and the field gave away to something just as absurd. 

In the dark of the cave rested a sprawling pre-war style suburb. The houses started as little trailers, but further in, they grew larger, with three-story houses resting close to the center. 

“We’re on the fifth level already?” said the astonished Laios. 

“We’re in the cave town,” muttered Chilchuck as he looked around at everything.

Some of the trailers were broken, and bits of pots, pans, and gore bags littered things. 

“I guess the mutants were telling the truth,” said Laios. “And it seems like they left in a hurry…That means the deathclaw isn’t that far off. Everyone stick together, let’s see what else we can find here.” 

Marcille attempted to disrobe from the gulper skin, but found that it was clinging to her, “Laios…the blood’s hardened…mother fuck…how am i supposed to mourn for Falin while dressed like a monster?!”

Chapter Text

The air in the residency hissed with electric energy. The Tansus were wasteland-rich and thrived off of the trade agreements with the New Commonwealth Provisional Government back east. This meant they were among the few to own a transporter relay in the safety of their home. 

The Tansus, their adopted children, and Namari appeared in the living room of their wasteland manor in a burst of blue electricity. 

Namari, however, had only traveled via molecular relay once Falin sprung it on the party. Her footsteps were unsteady as she tried to make for the door outside, but the room around her spun and twisted. She dropped to her knees and began to dry heave. 

She heard something along the lines of “Take her to the guest room.” 

She was scooped up by Kiki who in the moment seemed a lot taller. Taller still than normal. Namari, in her state of unease, saw her as being an angel, carrying her off to the afterlife. 

---

This left Mister Tansu to his real job on the island of Melini. He had to parlay with the mayor. The mayor’s house was located on the northern end of the island. A fortified structure made up of pieces of a yacht. 

As Mister Tansu and his wife stepped up to it, they fell under the shadow of the wasteland mansion. 

“I swear this place is more ostentatious with every visit,” said Mister Tansu. “Before they started looting the ruins in the caves, there wasn’t so much as a single servant here.” 

“The settlement’s been prosperous, dear,” said Mrs. Tansu. “Surely this is a good thing.” 

“The settlement is a glutton,” said Mister Tansu. “It can’t help but to become swollen like a tick…I hope we’re long gone by the time it finally bursts.” 

“Floke!” called out the mayor, who road up on a slepnir. “I’m glad you’ve returned safely. Please, follow me upstairs. I can have the boys whip us up something to munch on for dinner.”  

The mayor was a mustachioed gentleman. A completely unmutated human dressed in an old black suit with the only thing highlighting himself was a moth-eaten captain’s hat that he found in the yacht that would become his home. He ate dinner on the renovated deck of the ship, exposed to the heat of the sun, which gave him a slight sunkissed complexion.

Dinner was a simple affair: bread, cured brahmin belly, mutfruit jam, and eggs. It was dense, sugary, and greasy as all get out. 

Tansu sat adjacent to the mayor at the table and laid out a book of his findings on the table. 

“How is the cave these days, Floke?” asked the mayor as he draped slices of the brahmin belly over the jam-slicked roll of bread. 

“Drab and dank. The place has been practically scraped clean from levels one to three,” explained Tansu. “Raider hideouts are becoming more of an issue, and Super-Mutants are appearing as far up as level 3 and causing trouble.” 

The mayor made a dismissive noise. “How on Earth are they getting in?” 

“I’ve speculated that they’ve entered through old mining tunnels on the mainland. Something that goes beneath the lake…If you’re looking for suggestions on what to do about it. We could invest some serious caps into the local militia’s armaments and send them down to deal with the brutes.” 

“It’s a novel idea, Floke,” said the Mayor after taking the tiniest bites of his food. “The NCR has sent me a letter claiming that they have ownership of the ruins within the cave. Some nonsense about the descendants of the former residents of The Town, still being alive or some such brahminshit.” 

“The audacity!” shouted Tansu before slamming his hand against the table. “Don’t give them an inch, or they’ll take the whole island.” 

“I don’t intend to let them, Floke,” said the mayor. “To do that would mean me coming under their banner and limiting my power over the area. But…part of me does wonder what is it down there that they want? Do you have any ideas, Floke?” 

Tansu opened up the journal and showed the mayor exactly what he had been looking for when he was down in the depths. It was code. Lines and lines of computer code like the sort of thing you’d find in a busted terminal. 

“It’s graffitied on the walls of various structures on the third and forth level. Some of it’s complete garbage, but I’ve had a synth go over it, and he said that it’s very strong code, despite being unable to tell me what the purpose of it is.”

“Could the Californians be after that?” asked the Mayor.

 “It’s a strong possibility,” said Tansu. 

---

Narmi woke up in a warm bed. It wasn’t the kind of straw or stained pre-war mattresses that she was used to from the inns and communal homes of the island or Kahka Brud. The mattress she slept on was soft and luscious, and she felt as though her dense body might sink into it. 

“You’re awake,” said Kiki coming in with a dented kettle. Steam was flowing out of the mouth of it. 

“Yeah, I’m not built for teleportation,” she said, punctuating her statement with a hearty laugh. 

“But you’re feeling well, right?” she asked.

She produced a collapsible tin cup and sat it on the table beside Namari. She poured the steaming liquid into it. It smelled strong and festive. 

“Ginger tea,” explained Kiki. “For your stomach.” 

Ginger Tea

1 ginger root, finely ground

1 can of purified water (boiled)

Serves 3

+25 hp

- 1 hunger

Namari took the cup, which burned her hand, and began to sip her tea. The warm liquid did make her feel slightly better. When she was finished with her glass, Kiki took a seat next to her on the bed and offered her a small sack, jingling with the sweet sound of bottlecaps. 

Namari weighed the payment in her hand. “It feels a little heavier than it should. Isn’t it a bit much?” 

“Think of it as a retainer for services,” said Kiki with a wink. 

“Thanks a lot,” said Namari. “I appreciate it.” 

“Need a guide around town?” asked Kiki.

Indeed, she did. Namari was accompanied into town by the twins. Kiki and Kaka walked behind her dressed in their plain clothes a stitched pre-war dress for Kiki and a starched white button up shirt, slacks, and vest for Kaka. Truly, the best dressed set of twins in the wasteland. 

“Do you have a home here or are you staying at a common house?” asked Kiki as they followed her through the winding streets of Melini. 

“Actually,” said Namari. “I’m not heading back to my place just yet. I want to head to the cave entrance.” 

“You want to head down again?” asked Kaka, concern heavy in his sonorous voice. 

“Nah, nah,” said Namari. “I just have some business to take care of at the local church.” 

There was a church, a sprawling temple cut into the hill that rested beside the cave. The way that the padre there tells it, every brick was taken from an existing church that rested somewhere in old Arizona. Something called the St. Mary’s church, but Namari couldn’t answer with accuracy if that was it. All she knew was that it was big, and they had one special service that they offered to prospectors in the depths of the cave.

The Padre was a scrawny ghoul living in the church’s basement. Behind him were rows after rows of bodies kept in rudimentary coffins. The air was thick with the smell of death because the man was unable to properly embalm them. 

“Heya, Namari, how’s it shaking?” asked the Padre.

“I was wondering if a body came in. I’m looking to put in a claim for burial. White woman…maybe early 20s,” said Namari.

“Laios’s sister, right? Falin?” asked The Padre. “I’m sorry, but nobody’s brought up a corpse that matches her description.

“Right then,” said Namari. “Could you keep me posted? They’ve been down there looking for her for a week now, and I want to make sure they aren’t doing it in vain.”

“Toppers,” said The Padre. “But that’s going to cost you some caps.” 

Kiki and Kaka watched the whole thing play out with wide, horrorstruck eyes. 

“You two have never been here before, have you?” asked Namari as she caught them staring.

“Never,” said Kaka. “We’re fairly competent at crawling through the wastes; besides, we have the old man to care for us.” 

They ventured out of the church and up to a dining hall- the Cafè Da Matteo. Waitresses immediately approached the table, with one of them lovingly slapping Namari on one of her broad shoulders. 

“Namari, how’s it hanging? I see you finally dropped Laios’s gang. Who are the string beans you’re hanging with now?” she spouted.

The other waitress, a woman around Namari’s height, leaned over and not so subtly said to her, “You always had a thing for long legs, huh?” 

The battle-hardened Namari began blushing like a Mormon bride on her wedding day. She gritted her teeth and began to order, “Three glasses of arrack and maybe some bighorner wraps…If you please.” 

She put forward her caps to pay for the meal, and when the waitstaff left, she relaxed, and color vanished from her face, allowing her to become more professional. That’s what she was goddamn it, a professional. Professionals didn’t get flustered.

“You two seem a little green,” said Namari. “But you can’t let things like the wastes desensitize you to death. I’ve heard of places out east where things like death are temporary setbacks, but that isn’t the case here. Everything outside of this island and even within it wants to eat you, so you mustn’t be glib about things like death. That’s why it’s important to visit the corpsefishers.” 

“Namari, how old are you?” asked Kiki. 

“Were you even listening to what I said!” she shouted.

“Well,” began Kiki. “If we wanted to find your corpse from the corpsefishers, how would we describe you to him?” 

Namari needed to take a pause and consider that, but she answered, “I’m twenty-six.” 

“We’re twenty,” the twins said in unison, which was kind of scary. 

“The old man is 210,” said Kiki.

“And Mrs. Tansu is 204,” explained Kaka.

“I didn’t know trogs lived that long,” said Namari.

“They do, provided nothing kills them. They gradually regain human intelligence and beyond,” said Kaka. “It’s the reason why Tansu’s such an effective spymaster for the mayor.” 

“How did you two come to live with them?” asked Namari.

The two twins looked from one another then back to Namari with Kiki breaking the ice, “It’s a bit of a long story. We were orphans from a settlement further north of here-” 

She was cut off by the waistaff reappearing with more arrack and steaming hot food for the trio. 

Namari stood on her chair and spooned generous helpings of the food onto handmade corn tortillas for the pair. The ground meat smelled strongly of wasteland spices like jalapeno as well as locally grown things like red pepper. 

“Let me know if you want anything more,” said Namari. “There’s plenty of time for stories. It is our day off, after all.”

Chapter Text

The air in the cave town is stagnant and cold. Moisture beads on the sides of the buildings, but strangely, all of them are free of mold. Many travellers who have had the opportunity and the skill to reach the cave town have noticed this phenomenon, though none of them have an explanation for it. It’s a bizarre quirk of the underground. 

Marcille began setting up what was to be a precise trap. She left a trail of gunpowder after ripping open whatever bullets the crew had to spare, much to the protestation of our man, Chilchuck.

“The goal is simple,” said Laios. “Chilchuck and I will lead the deathclaw into this building.” 

He gestured at the two-story house with its redbrick structure.

“And Marcille will detonate it to knock the deathclaw out. When it goes down, Senshi and I will cut vital arteries in the neck.” 

“Then we’ll get revenge on the thing that took Falin from us,” said Marcille with heart. 

Laios nodded in affirmation. 

The ground shook as they felt the beast getting closer. They cast their eyes down the alley and assumed their positions. Each member of the party fought back the urge to run and flee this terrible place for a better life with less strife aboveground. But they all knew that there wasn’t any going back. This isn’t a place that you can run from. If it wasn’t the deathclaw down here, it would be one on the surface. 

Somehow, the beast seemed bigger than it was when they first encountered it. Its horns were long and twisted and curled until the sharp tips pressed against its neck. Teeth jutted out and like the horns were curled. But it had the same crimson scale pattern that they’d seen on the monster that had claimed Falin’s life. It was just horribly mutated by something none of them cared to know. 

“Holy shit,” whispered Marcille. 

The beast crained its head to the side and opened its mouth. The teeth were almost like rubber as they pushed to the sides, and it made a foul screech that propelled a breath that was heavy with the stench of the dead. 

Then it sprinted at them, its claws out to the sides, scraping brickwork and shingles off of the building, causing them to fall inward and smash against the ground. 

This thing wasn’t simply an Alpha Deatclaw anymore, it was if a wrym from mythology had been reborn through the cruelties of radiation and wasteland mutation. 

Marcille ran and hid inside with Senshi while Chilchuck and Laios stood in the direct path of the beast, waving their arms and making a tone of noise as it started on them. Once more, it made that hideous screech that made buildings shake and glass break. 

Laios and Chilchuck split off down two parallel allies, and lucky for the synth, the monster wanted larger prey and took off after Laios. 

Marcille breathed a sigh of relief and started with Senshi to build a fire. Never in her life had she been so excited to eat one of the wasteland’s apex predators. She imagined herself feasting alone on this thing, this horror that likely ripped Falin into barely recognizable pieces. 

The beast made a noise that sounded like gunfire as it sprinted after Laios, who ducked deftly into alleys only for the thing to break through and continue the chase through collapsing buildings, especially when they got further out to the suburbs. 

Marcille ran into houses in the suburbs of the cave town and began to work the ovens until the pilot lights broke. Chilchuck came in behind her with pressure cookers scavenged from the homes and used them as improvised bombs, turning entire homes into explosive deathtraps. 

Fires went underway, and buildings went “BOOM”! The sudden flood of light and stinging from shrapnel enforced the deathclaw’s path after Laios, in addition to pissing it off something fierce. 

The deathclaw ran until Laios led it into the building. The beast forced its head and body through a door that was never meant for a beast of its size. It reached inside like a cat, all thrashing and clawing, hungry for this tasty morsel. I screeched again, and Laios was brought to his knees by its call, it was almost enough to shatter his eardrums. He crawled out through the back door right as Marcille ignited the building, causing it to fall inward.

“Soup’s on!” she shouted, digging a kitchen knife out of her coat and walking up to the unconscious creature with Senshi. While the little bearded Santa-man slashed open the monster’s neck, she was stabbing at it with reckless abandon. “How do you like it! How do you like it!” 

By that time, the creature’s life had ended, and it was just Marcille, covered in blood, still stabbing at the hide and prying open scales to dig her knife into the meat. 

“Jesus Christ,” muttered Laios as he watched his friend’s bloodlust remain unsatisfied by the creature’s death. 

The group started to remove brickwork from the fallen creature, remembering what they’d come there to do. It wasn’t just about murdering a horror show from the depths of the cave. It was about Falin, goddamn it. 

Laios drew his sword and ran its blade along the lower abdomen of the monster. He recalled it’s anatomy very well from research guides, and with his hands, he pulled the skin back, revealing a mess of organs. 

When he got to the distended and growth-covered belly, he was met with something he didn’t expect. Some bones belonged to super-mutant hounds, a few larger bones belonging to super mutants, but he couldn’t find any trace of human bones or even Falin’s equipment. This thing wasn’t the monster that killed his sister. 

Chapter Text

“It has the same scar above its eye and scale pattern. By all sense, this should be it?” pondered Laios after he split open the intestinal tract. 

There wasn’t even the remains of Falin’s Pip-Boy. Laios ran through a series of calculations and carefully curated animal facts in his head. He was certain that Falin’s corpse should have still been inside the Deathclaw. It had only been a week. 

Marcille placed a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “Hey, look. We tried our best, we just didn’t get here in time to recover her.” 

Laios sat silently, taking it all in as he gradually rose to his feet. He realized during this entire week that he hadn’t had a moment to himself to properly grieve the loss of his sister. He’d always placed it to the side and thought that he could wait until they could take her back to the surface and bury her. Now, that moment was snatched from him. 

Marcille felt similarly. Her best friend and the woman she considered to be her closest companion was gone forever without so much as a tetechy piece of tech to show for it. Some part of her knew that given a peaceful life, she would outlive Falin, though she didn’t want it to happen so soon. And Falin was so young, to be twenty-two and dead felt criminal.  

Senshi had already started on the meat of the beast. Cutting off large flanks of it and frying it up in his pan. 

Marcille, bloodsoaked, was ready to hit the little Santa-man. But refrained. They could still get further revenge on this beast in one way. And that was through good home cooking. 

Senshi began to speak, and the less aggrieved Chil began to help him with his task. 

“First, we cut the flanks into thin strips and fry with oil, provided to us from the homes of our super-mutant friends,” said Senshi. 

Chilchuck began to prepare a simple bread with flour, water, oil, and salt. He flattened it out into a large disk, and when Senshi’s pan was free of meat, he placed it in the bottom and grilled it on both sides like a pancake. 

“I prepare an unleavened bread for a crust,” explained Chilchuck, who was looked on with approval by Senshi. 

Chilchuck then began to prepare some of the vegetables left over from their time with the mutants. Tomatoes were sliced, diced, then rendered into a fine paste, which was combined with water and wasteland herbs. 

It wasn’t long before it was ready.

Deathclaw Pizza

1 Deathclaw steak (thin sliced

1 Wasteland unleavened bread

3 tomatoes

1 can of purified water

4 Wasteland spice mix (doktor leaves, hubflower, dried barrel cactus fruit)

Serves 4

+4 radiation

-6 hunger

+6 Strength

Dinner was very somber, with Marcille and Laios lazily shoveling the resulting food into their mouths. It was good. The meat was tender and savory, but the victory felt hollow. This wasn’t something celebrated with the songs of a hard-fought battle. This was something cold, despite the wine the Chilchuck drunk and the generous meal before them. Even Senshi could feel it. 

“At least,” said Marcille, fighting back tears. “This will be the last monster meal we’ll have to eat before we make it back to the surface.” 

This did nothing to comfort Laios. Few things would provide comfort in this terrible moment. 

---

The party is ignorant, however, of how much worse things will get. In the inner buildings of the cave town, there lies a lab. In this lab, there’s a body lying on a slab. It’s the body of a woman in her twenties or so. She’s still alive, a billion needles stick out of her spine and each pump, sending a flood of the Forced Evolutionary Virus and a billion other groovy things into her bloodstream. 

Her eyes shoot open, and she screamed. She screams, but the party does not hear her, long assuming her to be dead. Her body shifts and undulates, her lower half becomes a malformed mass with four extra limbs.

A great hologram appeared behind her, the shining face of a ghoul who said to her, “You will be as my dragon and my champion, and you will destroy those who seek to pillage my town and my home.” 

The Behemoth exploded out of the laboratory house and screeched, shaking the foundations of the cave town. 

---

The party could feel the ground shake, and everyone was on their feet in an instant. 

Laios’s expression shifted from somber to razor-focused. Maybe he was wrong, maybe this was the deathclaw that took his sister. 

The group went outside and witnessed a very queer sight. There was a swarm of Mister Handy robots; their long mechanical limbs had attached themselves to the body of the deathclaw and had begun to fly it away as they watched. 

They felt the ground shake again, and this time it was punctuated with another screeching roar that shattered windows all over this town. One of the robots split off from the swarm and immediately began to clean up the glass. 

“So that’s how the town always stays clean,” muttered Laios as he drew his sword. 

“Not the time, Laios,” countered Chilchuck, drawing a pistol for as much good as that would do against one of the monsters of the depths. 

The Behemoth wandered through the maze of homes and buildings, her long tail lashing and crashing against the buildings and rendering them into piles of bricks and rubbish. The party froze as they recognized the unmistakable image of Falin Touden entering the light. Where she once walked on two legs, she now has the oversized body of a deathclaw, with a pair of vestigal insect-like wings resting on her hinde-back. There was something like a halo of impossible energy around her head that lit her face, showing off an expression of pure malice. 

“Laios, what the fuck is that!” shouted Chilchuck as his mind tried to make sense of what they were seeing. 

“I…I don’t know, it’s Falin!” shouted Laios. 

The Falin Behemoth’s halo of energy grew bright as the sun, lighting the entire town before she took off, flying into the higher levels of the cave-town. 

Chapter Text

Kabru came too on another level with someone waving his hand in his face. This was days earlier, mind you, days before the Falin-thing crawled screaming out of the lab. 

“It seems the drug you were under the influence of has worn off,” said Mister Tansu, giving Kabru a light slap to his face. “You’re lucky that someone placed you on a well-travelled path, otherwise, you might have ended up being food for raiders.” 

Kabru vaguely remembered a gun battle with a cult of atomites and a blonde man. He didn’t believe the man was actively involved in the fight, but he remembered that and something like herbal tea on his tongue. Otherwise, there was nothing. 

He searched his person and found he was without the meager supplies they’d brought into the caves. 

The others did the same and found that they too were without food. They had their caps and a stack of NCR bills but nothing to eat. They were fucked beyond belief. 

“Well,” said Kabru, “We’ve got no choice but to head back for the surface. We can resupply there, then come back down here and deal with the food thieves.” 

“Have it your way then,” said Mister Tansu before teleporting away, along with the rest of his party, in a flash of electricity. 

The party walked along a path that took them along the bounds of an underground lake. 

Internally, Kabru was in the process of eliminating different prospector groups that could have been responsible for the theft of their food. He was at the head of the group as they walked along, and that’s when things started to get heavy. The air was flooded with a noxious green fog. 

Kabru stood alone, surrounded by feral ghouls, but they did not attack him. He drew his revolver and aimed it at one who rushed him with…the ghoul was holding a chain-fed minigun and was swatting at him with it. 

He’d never known ferals to use tools, let alone guns, to bash people. The feral was also low to the ground, and Kabru made a deductive leap that would astound most. Even as a headache was starting to form in the front of his skull. 

He got around the creature and placed them in an arm lock before whispering, “Daya” into her ear. 

The creature stopped squirming and gradually started to look more human in Kabru’s eyes. This wasn’t a sudden feral attack, they were being drugged by this noxious green fog. 

Kabru cast his eyes around, and he noticed one of the ghouls barked while another feral fled off into the mists. He immediately singled them out as Mick and Kuro. That left Holm and Rin. Holm was crouched down and staring off into space. 

Then there was Rin. Rin, who looked almost like herself only with mottled skin and long stringy black hair. Rin, who had a halo of electric light around her ghoulish head, while the rocky floor started to shift and rise suddenly. 

Kabru knew immediately that her psi-talent was showing, and she could potentially kill all of them with brain anurysems or simply blow up their heads. 

He did the only thing he thought was sensible and rushed across the room and pressed his lips to her, breaking her psychic concentration.

The moment didn’t feel great for either of them. For a split second, it was like they were both lip to lip with a toothy piece of beef jerky. 

A blast of psi-energy still sounded, but it cut through the minds of the party, revealing their true forms to one another and showing off the true culprits in this scheme.

Just to the north of them was a party of raiders dressed in road leathers and battered wasteland armor. Each was suited with their own heavily customized gas masks.  The catch with these raiders was that they were unarmed, save for a set of hallucinagen grenades that they got from who knows where. 

“Oh shit,” said the raider at the head of the party. 

Kabru started towards them, holstering his pistol and drawing a great big fuck off dagger. 

“Listen, man,” began the leader of the party of raiders.

“No,” said Kabru. “You will listen. It’s illegal for parties of prospectors to kill one another…but you’re raiders. You’ve only come down here to loot people and steal their stuff…You’re kind of like tumors.” 

He seized the head raider by the collar of his leather jacket and drew the blade across his neck, splashing his fear-riddled compatriots with his crimson life.

One of them tried to run, but Kabru was fast with his revolver. He pulled it out and fanned out three shots to the legs, sending him down to the ground screaming. He popped the other two in the head with single shots each before walking over to the fallen man and blowing his head off. 

Once more, Kabru was covered in blood and satisfied with a job well done. He had a smile on his face as he returned to his party. Mickbell ran over to the corpses and began looting them. 

“Hey, chief,” said Mick. “These guys were loaded. Caps, chems, and more food than we could ask for.” 

“Fantastic,” said Kabru, dipping his hands into the water to wash the blood off his face. Unaware that the action was attracting something cruel. “Not a huge shock that the raiders down here are making bank off of the would be thrill seekers.” 

Rin sat by the water’s edge, stewing. Daya and Mickbell were tasked with dumping the raider corpses in the water. Fish food for the creatures that dwelled beneath. 

Kabru looked over at Rin. “You’re brooding again. Sorry about that. It was just the quickest thing I could think of to get us out of that bind.” 

“Well, it worked,” she said, wincing at the sense-memory of kissing what she’d started thinking of a Ghoul-bru.

“Nice shooting out there, Tex,” said Holm. “Are you hurt?” 

Kabru shook his head. “I’m fine, thanks. 

The group sat down on the edge of the lake and began to dine. Dinner was stolen dried brahmin jerky, dried mutfruit, and a jar of cactus fruit aspic. 

+10 hp was restored to each party member

-6 hunger abided.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Kabru. “When we come back down. We should go after whoever’s stolen our food. I’ve been going through my internal Rolodex, and I think I’ve come up with a decent suspect.” 

“Oh?” offered Daya. “What’s up?”

“After the fight with the children of Atom, I remember vaguely glimpsing a blonde man, a ghoul, and a synth.” 

“That’s a specific party makeup,” said Mick, sarcasm heavy in his voice. 

“There’s not a whole lot of parties who would willingly travel with a ghoul is the thing,” said Kabru. “Too much bigotry wrapped around the possibility of them going feral…So I think we’re looking at the Touden party…but there’s something up about them. They aren't moving with a full set anymore.” 

“What makes you figure?” asked Mick.

“I don’t recall seeing the sister anywhere,” said Kabru. “I know she and the ghoul are former Followers, and they tend to do whatever they can to heal.”

“It goes with their philosophy,” said Rin.

“So that means that she’s missing. I also recall seeing their former heavy guns girl with the party that woke us up,” said Kabru.

“That’s Namari,” explained Daya. “Her dad was a bigshot gun runner for the island before he fucked off after embezzeling a bunch of caps.” 

“There’s also the lack of the Japanese man, Shuro,” said Kabru. “I know he came to the island some time after his ship docked in St. Babs. He split with his original party after falling in love with the sister. So the sister is the main piece in the party splitting up. She’s gone. Missing even.” 

“It’s disturbing how much you know about all of these people,” commented Rin.

Kabru batted his eyelashes at Rin. “Ignoring that.” 

He then continued. “So, the sister’s missing. The party’s split up. They’re desperate.” 

“I’m surprised if it’s Chilchuck that’s still with them,” commented Mickbell. “The man’s a greedy little shit and thinks he’s the representative of all synths on the island with his little guild. If I were in the guild, he’d pitch a fit about me having Kuro work for me. He thinks he’s hot shit because he was purpose built by The Institute for ruin exploration.” 

Mickbell took the cyberdog by the face and began to gently play with his jowl. Kuro allowed this, thriving off of the attention. 

“You wanna work for me, don’t you, buddy?” said Mickbell, putting on a baby voice.

Kuro wagged his tail enthusiastically. 

“That leaves the Touden siblings,” said Kabru. “They and their ghoul friend are almost complete unknowns to me. They used to loot some of the good tech from the upper floors, and they once donated proceeds from a hunt to party members who couldn’t go down anymore due to injuries.” 

“A happy enough ending,” said Rin.

“That’s until you realize that the party members I’ve mentioned weren’t injured at all. They’re running illegal goods off and onto the island. All set up by a hefty payout from the Toudens,” said Kabru. “I think they’re making a power play, and if they can unlock the secrets of this cave, they could lead a small time coup against the mayor.” 

“Kabru,” said Mickbell. “You hate the mayor.” 

“I do,” said Kabru. “But he’s a useful stooge for maintaining order. If he goes, what happens then? People will stop going down into the cave. The population of the monsters down here grows, and they overrun Melini.”

“It sounds like you’re catatrophizing,” said Daya. 

“I am not. Wasteland horrors overrun settlements every day if their populations aren’t kept in check,” Kabru said with a haunted look in his very pretty blue eyes. “It isn’t raiders or the enclave or brotherhood shitheads. It’s the things that go bump in the night that you can’t reason with.”

The entire party fell silent and finished their meal. 

That’s when the water began to rumble. A thing that finished eating the bodies of the raiders had risen to the surface. A glorious mirelurk queen, a mess of insect-like feelers and legs underneath a world-breaking carapice. 

“Everyone fan out!” shouted Kabru, and everyone followed suit. 

The queen began spraying a stream of noxious chemicals, and Kabru began firing at it with his revolver. He kept hitting it, but nowhere crucial. 

“Damn!” he shouted. He couldn’t even begin to imagine where a carotid artery on this thing fell. 

Something leapt onto his shoulders, and before he could react, Kabru saw a young woman dressed in black leaping from him and onto the Mirelurk Queen. She had a grenade in her hand, and she shoved it into some space beneath the shell before diving into the water like an old world olympian. She emerged on the bank, and an explosion rocked the giant crab to the side. 

The women shouted something in Japanese, and a super mutant…or something that looked very similar to a super mutant cut across the lake and bashed it with a giant rebar club, knocking it toward a man dressed like an ancient samurai.

The man’s face was drawn, his eyes looked heavy and dark, and his face was covered in the scratchy-looking beginnings of a beard. He drew his katana and angled the blade side up before slashing north along the thing’s head and shell, cleaving a massive gash in the monster before it fell. 

He turned away from the monster as it began to sink back into the lake. He seemed tired of everything that had transpired. A woman in white robes rushed to his side, she was accompanied by robots that were unlike any that Kabru had seen before. They floated across the water like a Mister Handy might, but they were boxy and human-shaped. If he didn’t know better, he might have thought they were men in suits. But then she was suddenly flanked by this horrible looking robot that was the size of a radscorpion and shaped like a spider.

The man and the woman in the white robes exchanged words, and they began to walk away, but Kabru closed the distance between them. He immediately recognized this man from the Touden party. 

“They used to call you ‘Shuro, ’ didn’t they?” asked Kabru.

The man turned to him. “My name is Toshiro,” he answered in English with annoyance heavy in his voice. 

“I know that…I also know you’re seeking Falin Touden,” said Kabru, smiling softly.

At this, Toshiro’s eyes widened and he was suddenly more expressive, “Where is she? Have you found her corpse?” 

“No,” said Kabru. “But if you like, we can help you.”

Chapter Text

The gang sat in a circle around an unlit fire, the only light provided by Laios’s Pip-Boy. They could hear something was flapping its wings high above them, and they didn’t know if it was Falin or another one of the cave’s myriad irradiated horrors. 

Laios stared wild-eyed at the fire, as if his solemn gaze would spark the coals to life. 

“Laios?” asked Marcille, placing a hand on his shoulder. 

“I just…I expected to be hauling back a corpse,” said Laios. 

Chil was about to say that they should take refuge in one of the houses, but his powerful synthetic ears picked up something further down one of the entrance tunnels to the cave town. It was a crowd of footsteps, some mechanical, others human. 

“We’ve got company,” said Chil as he directed his gaze down one of the tunnels. 

Everyone got to their feet and armed themselves. 

Laios looked down at his Pip-Boy and said, “Whatever they are, I don’t think they’re hostile.” 

A series of light balls flew up into the air, illuminating this new band of travellers. At the head was a pair of men, one of whom everyone had seen before. Another was a face known only to a few other members of the party. 

Laios sheathed his sword and cut across the gravel lawns of the cave town to the man he knew as Shuro. He wrapped him in a big, aggressive hug that threatened to lift the would-be samurai into the air. 

Toshiro looked thinner than he ought to be, his face was gaunt, and he didn’t have that close, clean-shaven appearance that Laios and company had come to expect from him, but all in together, Laios was just happy to see a man whom he considered to be a close friend. 

“He’s overly familiar,” muttered Maizuru to herself in a language Laios only half understood from his conversations with Toshiro. 

When Laios released Toshiro, he clapped him on the shoulder appreciatively. “You have no idea how good it is to see you. Have you been eating?” 

“He has not,” chided Maizuru in English. 

“There isn’t any time,” said Toshiro. “Have you found it? Did you find the deathclaw that slew Falin?” 

Laios’s smile faded, and he took a step back, “Yes. We defeated it, Shuro. You don’t need to worry anymore.”

“And Falin?” asked Toshiro, who felt his entire body shake. It was as if the structure threatened to turn inwards.

“She’s alive,” said Laios. “But we got separated.” 

Kabru, who stood beside, watched this and studied Laios’s face. He could smell the stench of deception on the tall, blonde man, and frankly, the aroma was delicious.

A smile briefly interrupted Toshiro’s dour yet neutral expression, but he quickly corrected back to being neutral. 

“You need rest, my lord,” said Maizuru as she subtly put herself between Laios and Toshiro. “And importantly, you need to eat. I shall have everyone prepare a meal for you.” 

“I take it you were the local bumpkin our lord was paling around with?” said Hien. 

“That’s right,” said Laios, not having the context for anything the ninja-like woman was saying. 

---

Rin and Kabru split off from the main group to talk while everybody else engaged one another in conversation. Senshi and Maizuru began to cook together, mixing some rice and dried fish into patties before frying them. 

“Aren’t you going to confront them?” asked Rin in hushed tones. 

“Nah,” said Kabru. “Did you see the way he looked at us? His expression wasn’t filled with guilt. But he is hiding something and I intend to suss it out.” 

Kabru cut across the field and went over to Laios and Kabru. It only occurred to him when he was that close that Laios was a lot taller than him. Taller and more built. Laios was a boy who ate, and it powered him.

“Forgive me,” said Kabru. “I couldn’t help but be curious about you. You said that you slayed the deathclaw, right? That’s no easy feat.” 

“That’s about right,” said Laios. “It wasn’t an easy fight, that’s for sure. I’m Laios, good to meet you.” 

Kabru stared at him for half a second too long. They’d met sort of on multiple occasions, but this guy simply didn’t remember? That was unlikely. What sort of cryptic game was the Touden brother playing at with him?

“Would you excuse me for a moment? I need to talk with Shuro in private,” said Laios. 

Laios and Toshiro walked off into one of the abandoned houses, and they were followed by a woman who was dressed head to toe in black, even covering her face and head. Kabru remembered Kuro following her during their walk to the cave town, growling the entire time as if something about her just didn’t quite smell right to him. 

---

Once they were alone in the living room of an abandoned house that clearly looked like it had been the sleeping quarters for some super-mutants. Laios sat Toshiro down and began to speak to him. 

“Falin is alive, but she was turned into something else,” said Laios. “Some kind of monster.” 

“What?” hissed Toshiro, standing up. “What do you mean?” 

“What I mean is the situation is beyond complicated,” said Laios. “When we arrived, we expected to find her in the deathclaw, but she wasn’t. She was somewhere in the town being experimented on.” 

“That’s insane,” said Toshiro. “What do you mean? Tell me everything you saw, immediately.” 

“It was like…Have you ever seen a centaur before?” asked Laios. 

“Like from a picture book?” asked Toshiro.

“No, no,” said Laios. “Of the supermutant variety. She was like a mix of a deathclaw, bat, and herself,  but rendered impossibly big. I’m telling you this now because I trust you. We are gonna fix her somehow.” 

“Fix her!?” shouted Toshiro. “The only thing that can fix that is death, Laios!” 

A horrible screech pierced the air, and something flew down onto the scene. 

Toshiro and Laios rushed out to see that the party was being waylaid by Falin in her glorious chimera form. 

Chapter Text

Rin immediately started to scream when confronted by this twisted abomination of a  mutant before them. She’d seen centaurs before. She’d even seen mutant hounds and the results of FEV that failed to render people into super-mutants. But this was something wholly new and grotesque. 

“Nobody needs to attack! She’s just scared!” urged Laios, but his words were not heeded. 

Falin had glided down on those little protrusions that were described as wings, they looked little more than something vestigial. Around flew insects, things the size of cats that would feast on rats the size of dogs. 

“Bloodbugs!” shouted Kabru as the insects descended upon the combined parties of explorers. 

Tade attempted to rush the Falin-thing with her rebar-laden club only for the thing to seize her by the face with a wet, fleshy talon and fling her into one of the houses, smashing wooden frames and everything in the super-mutant’s path. 

Nobody stood a chance against the thing as she wrecked through house after house in some sort of mad search for something. Anytime anyone attempted to get close, they were hit by the radius of psychic energy, and it threw them back hard. 

Kabru, brave, murderous, but virtuous, Kabru scampered up Falin’s frame with a knife and dug it into her chest, jabbing in her neck, lungs, and heart, but she threw him to the ground like he was just another piece of garbage and flew off, leaving a trail of foul-smelling blood in her wake. 

The bloodbugs, by contrast, were incredibly easy for most of the skilled wastelanders to dispatch. Every one of them had encountered bloodbugs in the past, especially in flooded areas where they liked to breed. That meant that beyond the town lay some kind of body of water that was, as of then, undiscovered.

The slaughter had seemingly halved Kabru’s party. Daya was dead; she was killed when Falin first leapt off of one of the taller buildings, and she’d seized the little woman and squashed her like an insect. This left Rin, Holm, possibly Mick, and Kuro. 

Toshiro’s party was relatively unscathed, with only their robots destroyed, Tade suffering a head injury, and their mysterious cloaked girl having vanished in the chaos that ensued. 

Laios and Toshiro stood in the center of the chaos and both men looked at each other with a kind of harrowing, monstrous hatred that seemed to radiate from Toshiro.

“Do you see!” shouted Toshiro, allowing some rage to creep into his otherwise neutral tone. “We have to track her down and put her out of her misery before she kills anybody else, Laios!” 

“There’s got to be a way to reverse this!” returned Laios. “Don’t you see, all I’m doing is trying to protect her.” 

“You’re going to get people killed and prolong her suffering!” 

Laios couldn’t take it anymore and delivered a brick-breaking slap across Toshiro’s jaw, sending the man staggering back from being hit by one of Laio’s powerful paws. 

But was our boy, our man, our hero Toshiro stopped? Hell no. He rushed Laios, and the two men engaged in a foppish slap fight while everyone gathered the dead or broken machinery from around the site. 

Holm emerged from a hole he’d hastily dug in the lawn of one of the houses while Chil and Mick were discovered inside an overturned fridge beneath some rubble. It was a miracle those two weren’t dead. 

Meanwhile, Laios and Toshiro exchanged blows and hurled insults at one another like children on a playground might. Hair was pulled, eyes were blackened, and despite all the death around them, everyone found this to be the most tiring of displays. 

“I really thought he’d outgrown his aggressive streak,” commented Maizuru. 

Once everyone had been gathered, Senshi went looking and discovered a few of the bloodbugs, clutches of eggs. 

“I wish we had some oatmeal and time,” commented Senshi. “I’d love to make some of these bloodbugs into black pudding.” 

Maizuru regarded the little man and his collection of eggs. “Perhaps omelettes?” 

“Do you happen to have rice on your person?” asked Senshi.

“Not one me currently, but with our supplies, yes.” 

Toshiro finally went down after sustaining a few blows from Laios. 

“Do you see, Shuro! I have been eating a balanced meal every day since we went down here, and you have been neglecting yourself and pushing yourself to the physical limit!” shouted Laios.

Maizuru sighed and she and Senshi set up a pair of campfires and began to cook their respective meals. 

The rice was boiled relatively easily, but it was the egg dish that Senshi began crafting that required the most focus. 

“One egg per person should do it,” he commented to nobody in particular. 

He used a knife to slice open the gelatinous membrane of the bloodbug eggs and emptied them into a bowl, repeating this until his collection was exhausted. He then salted them and stirred until they became a yellow-green mix. Following that, he poured the egg mix into a hot pan and began to gently roll until he had a series of fist sized omelettes ready for each person gathered at the scene. 

Bloodbug Tamagoyaki (and Rice)

1 Bloodbug Egg per person.

Pinch of Salt (to taste)

Oil (little bit)

Serves those who survived

+2 rads

-8 hunger

-1 Agility for 2 hours.

Toshiro, lying on the ground, half-willingly allowed Maizuru to feed him the rice, but he wouldn’t touch the omelette. 

“Is that how you all have been surviving down here? Eating wasteland cuisine?” quipped Kabru. 

“Yeah!” exclaimed Laios before offering the shorter man a roll of his omelette. 

Kabru stood back and weighed his options:

1. The idea of eating the omelette disgusted him beyond belief. 
2. Eating it would ingratiate him with Laios, and he wanted to learn more about this bizarre man. 

Kabru selected option two and apprehensively unhinged his jaw to accept Laios’s forkful of omelette into his mouth. The saltiness of the omelette was overwhelming, but it wasn’t wholly bad…To be frank, though, the only thing that kept Kabru from vomiting was the little voice in the back of his mind that told him that he needed to eat it to keep Laios happy, because god only knew what the man’s goals were. He knew from his fight with Toshiro that his primary goal involved saving his sister, but did that mean he would unwittingly unleash a mutated monster into the world?

Meanwhile, Laios was just thinking about what a cool guy Kabru seemed to be. Especially after having a knockdown, drag-out fight with Toshiro. 

When everything had settled down, the slightly rejuvenated Toshiro approached Laios with his eyes heavy. 

“I’m going to return to the surface with my retainers,” said Toshiro. “I…It pains me to do it, but I’m going to have to report what I’ve seen to the local authorities. Then I’m leaving for home.” 

“I understand,” said Laios. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop; we’re going to cure whatever this is with Falin.” 

“I’m going to return with him,” said Kabru. “We have to bury Daya and report what happened to her husband…He’s going to be beyond devastated, but I'm rooting for you. Don’t mess things up.” 

Toshiro produced a handheld radio from his bag and handed it to Laios.

“Contact us using this and we’ll ferry you off Melini and out of NCR territory if things get dicey with Falin,” said Toshiro. 

“Thanks…I’m sorry for hitting you,” said Laios. 

“I apologize in kind,” said Toshiro. “I’ll see you on the surface if you survive.” 

The other two parties gathered in the edge of the cave town and dropped a couple of relay grenades, vanishing in a puff of smoke and a crackle of electricity.

Chapter Text

The parties rematerialized just outside of the town proper, in a field just adjacent to Baker’s Row, so named because the neighborhood was clustered around a bakery that was built out of the remains of an old shuttle bus. Kabru and company laid out Daya’s body so that she could face the sun. Well…face, might be a generous way to describe the pulped mess that made up her head, but it was the thought that counted, right?

Kabru noticed something in the distance, though; it was a steamship, docked alongside all the usual customers. It wasn’t like any of the fishing boats or little sailboats that littered the flooded lake that surrounded Melini. 

“Mick,” called out Kabru. “Use your advanced vision and tell me what’s on the front of that boat.” 

Mickbell ran up to the hill where Kabru stood, and he stared out across the field and down to the docks. 

“It’s got a bird of some kind on it,” said Mickbell. “Maybe a canary?” 

“Shit, fuck,” growled Kabru. 

Kabru craned his head around, and he saw Toshiro marching off. He ran over to seize the man by the hand.

“What?” asked Toshiro. 

“You, follow me, things have gone tits up in the worst way imaginable,” said Kabru as he ran with Toshiro in the direction of the mayor’s palatial mansion. 

They arrived outside and found Namari, Kaka, and Kiki standing guard. 

“Hey Shuro, been a minute, how are things?” asked Namari.

“There isn’t any time,” snapped Kabru. “Where’s the mayor?” 

Namari gestured with her head at the building. “He’s meeting with some ghouls from the NCR.” 

“Fuck,” repeated Kabru. 

“What’s the issue?” asked Toshiro. 

“The Canaries have arrived on the island. That means the little patch of irradiated hell that we call The Cave has become unstable.”

“Oh shit,” muttered Namari. “I figured they were important, but I didn’t figure they were that damn important.” 

Namari ascended the stairs and then threw the doors open for them. 

“You didn’t explain to me what’s so important about some random ghouls?” asked Toshiro. 

“They’re the New California Republic’s Special Problems Unit,” explained Kabru. “After the second battle of Hoover Dam, the NCR set up task forces of ghouls and supermutants that they’d send on suicide missions to pacify areas or to remove irradiated monsters so land could be settled and developed.” 

Kabru found the mayor’s office and burst open the doors. He was met by a bunch of cloudy eyes falling upon him. The mayor looked positively neutered as he sat in his chair while six ghouls dined on fine meats, cheeses, and drank his wine. Mister Tansu stood to the side and watched with a dour expression on his face as he watched this play out.

“I seek an audience with the mayor!” shouted Kabru, but he didn’t need to; all conversation had ceased the moment he entered.

“Mind your tongue, boy, serious business is being conducted in here,” scolded Mister Tansu. 

“It’s fine by me,” said a ghoul wearing a slightly curly blonde wig. “Let the smoothskin speak his peace.” 

“It’s about the cave, sir,” said Kabru. “A new kind of monster has made itself known deep within the depths of it.” 

“And?” asked one of the canaries, this one was a woman with a bald head (though that’s hardly atypical for ghouls).  “We’re already here, we’ll take care of whatever beasties go bump in the night.” 

“I think we need to slowly evacuate the cave,” said Kabru. “There are still prospectors and merchants on the upper levels of the cave.” 

“You’re awfully bold,” said another ghoul. He had a glass eye the color of polished obsidian, and he peered at Kabru with his good eye. His tone was different from any other ghoul that Kabru had met; it was smooth and not quite crackly like a typical ghoul voice. “How did you come by your information? Hmm?” 

“I saw it first hand,” said Kabru. “Also…My mother was one of your number for a time. I know how your intelligence-gathering operations are carried out. I hoped to bring this information to the forefront before anyone went down into the cave.” 

“Hmm?” offered a taller ghoul of a slightly darker complexion and a silver colored wig. “Are you Milsiril’s kid? I remember seeing you as a child. You’ve grown quite a bit.” 

“Yes,” said Kabru. “In addition, this new monster. It used to be human, but it’s been twisted into some kind of new shape. Imagine a centaur, but larger and with some kind of psyker capabilities.” 

“Good god,” muttered the bald woman again. 

“Your recommendations are sound,” said the glass-eye ghoul. “I want it to be known that I do not trust you, not even a little. You’ve got something of the devil about you, mister blue eyes.” 

Kabru narrowed his eyes as the ghoul spoke.

“Show me this monster,” said the glass-eye ghoul.