Part 7: Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns...
Previous: Part 6: One act of kindness, one act of cruelty...

A word to the wise - if you are recruiting members for a paramilitary group and you cannot finance training or budget in equipment, it's probably best to avoid recruiting unarmed civilians with no experience in combat. If you are building outposts in the wilderness that must survive deadly radiation storms, Super Mutant attacks, food shortages, and extremes of weather, it's probably best to avoid constructing these settlements out of rotting wood and old rusty tin. If you are trying to knit together the fragmented remains of civilization, it may be a good idea to have some sort of method of rapid communications not based on unreliable shortwave radio, fallible couriers, and signal pistols.

However, not everyone agrees with this assessment. Clara and Preston Garvey certainly don't. "General" Clara and her sidekick "Not A General But Still High Ranking Enough To Confer The Rank Of General On Random People He Just Met" Preston continue on their quest to unite the whole Commonwealth under a single banner, and not incidentally receive kickbacks to the tune of 10% of the gross. They go about this by walking from settlement to settlement, seeing if the locals have any odd jobs that need doing, and sure enough they do.

Now, I'm not saying that the local settlers giving these odd jobs are taking advantage of Clara and Garvey. It just looks like it. I mean, if some random strangers wandered into your house and asked to do you a service, and in return you must continue to let them do you services in the future, would you object? Probably not. The concept of "taxes" or even "reciprocity" never came up in any of these discussions, so this is all one-sided, and that side may or may not be innately evil. There's no proof that, for example, the Abernathy family had no claim on a lost locket and instead sent Garvey and Clara out to slaughter another band of settlers starting up their own farm, with whom they had been in dispute over some fertilizer or something. After all, when the "raiders" are all dead, who's to say whether they were bad guys, or just folks trying to get by in the world, wiped out for no reason by a couple of rubes at the behest of some real assholes?

At any rate, eventually the burgeoning alliance becomes big enough that even Garvey recognizes a need for some sort of central control, or at least someone to keep track of which group is accusing which other group of evil deeds in an effort to choke out economic competition. Sanctuary is apparently not a good place - he needs something more "central" than an outpost on the edge of things, so he picks... an outpost on a different edge of things. Garvey tells Clara that it's time to re-take the Castle, which is apparently an old civil war fort that was abandoned years ago because some monster or monsters killed everyone inside after destroying most of the defensive wall. Now my feeling is that if dozens of well-armed, well-armored, well-motivated people behind a twenty-foot thick concrete wall couldn't adequately defend themselves against an attacker, five folks with a couple of pew-pew guns aren't going to get any sort of revenge, unless "indigestion" is considered revenge.

Clara, the ditzy dimwit, doesn't seem to think the same way. She enthusiastically agrees with Garvey that it's high time she throws her life away on a mad gamble against an immortal foe in order to make a home in a dangerous area so she can make a bigger target of herself in the future.

The battle to retake the Castle goes swimmingly, like child's play. That is to say, lots of thrashing about and not much forward progress. The mirelurks and hatchlings proceed to kick the shit out of everyone present until Clara pulls out an explosive submachine gun, after which the mirelurks and hatchlings proceed to kick the shit out of everyone present except Clara, which I suppose is some improvement. Eventually a huge Mirelurk Queen pops out of the water, which should not surprise anyone. The other members of Clara's little team get steamrolled and Clara herself hides inside the castle walls, popping her head out from time to time to see if Garvey has gotten back up and maybe toss a little lead in the general direction of the monstrosity. The Queen seems to have forgotten that she could break through said walls, and thus Clara survives the ordeal. All told, the battle takes about 20 hours before the queen dies, possibly from boredom.

A little construction project later, and the radio tower is up and running. Preston insists that this has been a great success, despite the loss of 60% of his entire army. Clara and Garvey get back into the swing of things, rescuing kidnapped husbands, clearing out mole rats, and generally being dogsbodies and gofers for the other "helpless" citizens of the Commonwealth.

Eventually enough settlements have been gathered under the protection of the Minutemen that the next quest in the chain starts some veterans have taken notice of the resurgence. One in particular, named Ronnie Shaw, has taken it upon herself to bring the Castle's defenses up to snuff. Particularly the defenses that fall under the umbrella of "offenses" instead. She wants to build artillery emplacements, which will give the Minutemen the ability to rain destruction down on anyone who disagrees with their benign rule.

A fun-filled adventure of crawling through some tunnels filled with explosive mines and explosive gas and explosive turrets ensues, culminating with a robot shooting explosive rockets at Clara as she shoots her explosive SMG at it until it finally dies explosively, whereupon Ronnie opens the door leading to explosive artillery schematics and gear.

The artillery itself seems pretty low-tech for some people wielding laser guns, but Clara, Ronnie, and Preston seem happy enough with it. I'm sure it will come in handy the next time Clara needs to dismember some raiders or super mutants or a single radroach because she's bored and wants to see something go boom. Preston tells her to build them at all Minuteman bases, because when you're building artillery for defense of your headquarters, why stop there? Why not expand your military might to cover the entire countryside, intimidating the peasantry into respecting your authority under the threat of vaporization?

Oh, okay, perhaps the Minutemen aren't really like that. Perhaps I'm just too cynical. It happens to clothing as it ages. I knew a battered fedora once who was convinced the entire world was about to end in a massive, hellish conflagration. Of course, it said this on October 22, 2077, so maybe there really is something to the old adage that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Anyway, Clara finally decides that she's had enough of the Minutemen for now, and after a quick jaunt back to Sanctuary to upgrade her equipment yet again, she's finally ready to get back to the business of finding her kidnapped son and getting revenge on the kidnapper. Or so I thought.

Next: Part 8: We are the order piercing forward...
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Author's note: The Castle. A fortress dedicated to defense and protection of those within, impregnable to anything and everything... except the most recent thing to bust down the walls and kill everyone inside.

Image: This is the Castle. Note the rebuilt walls and defensive turrets. I just hope that this time they don't take their stone fortress for granite (Get it? Huh? Anyone? No? Okay...).

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