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Turning On The Lights (Charley's Story, Chapter 3)


gregaaz

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The next morning, I woke up feeling chilled. Despite the thick blankets that came with the bed, I realized what was left of my house just wasn't adequately sealed against the weather. I was going to have to board up the house if I wanted it more hospitable. Then again, I'd already been thinking about building walls the night before, so I started reviewing the options in the Workshop catalogue. To my dismay, I discovered my options were rather limited. I suppose I could have fabricated individual boards and nailed them up myself, but doing the math I figured the amount of material waste there would be too much. There were some kits for multiple wooden boards that looked like they were intended for fencing or making simple garden sheds, and those seemed like a better input to output option. There were also a lot of concrete barriers of all different sizes and shapes, including some with inset windows. If I had meaningful amounts of concrete and glass, I'd like that very much for some of the gaps in my house's walls. 

 

In the end, I settled on using the shack kits to board up the house. Mentally I noted that I'd have to loop back and research my options for power generation, because when I was done the inside of my house was going to be a lot darker. Nevertheless, with some help from Codsworth I cleared the vines from the side of my house by the bedroom and started outputting the garden shack kits. I got about a fifth of the exterior boarded up - it wouldn't keep the wind out of the living room area, but now at least the bedroom and bathroom would be a bit better insulated. Speaking of the bathroom, I needed to find a way to evaluate the condition of the plumbing in the house. Running water was going to have to be a long-term plan, but eventually it would be great if I had an alternative to shitting in the woods.

 

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So now I had my goal: get the house fully boarded up, then start thinking about my options for creature comforts. Codsworth and I plotted out a grid of the neighborhood and then systematically started searching for high value items we could drag back to the Workshop for reclamation. We also brought back anything wooden, since it was pretty clear to me that I'd be sticking with those prefab sheds at least initially. Step by step - with a long pause midway as we waited for a passing rainstorm to roll through - we boarded up the house, until the only open area was the windowframe next to my front door. I'd have to fabricate a replacement window eventually, but for now I was willing to accept a draft in exchange for being able to see who or what was outside the house.

 

While I waited out the storm, I flipped through the electrical utilities section of the Workshop manual. It had quite a lot to choose from, many of which were gated behind a requirement for an electrician's license (which I readily bypassed with the administrator's code). Conduit, light fixtures, breaker boxes, even some consumer electronics like televisions and kitchen appliances. They all had a selling point in common - fully compatible with cordless transmitted power. Under other circumstances, that would be great. However, I seriously doubted the municipal plutonium well at Concord was operational. Maybe there was some way to tap the big transmission lines down to Boston, but again - that would only help if the power was still flowing... and two hundred years after the war, I doubted it. 

 

But thinking about the Concord well gave me an idea, and I spent some time inspecting the Workshop. It, after all, clearly had power. Looking the machine over, it seemed to have its own very small fusion reactor powering it. Unfortunately, I couldn't see any good way to tap into its supply, but thinking of the fusion reactor got me thinking about micro-fusion cells and that got me thinking about batteries. I did some more searching and, lo and behold, I found an option in the catalogue for replacement batteries - simple wet cells designed for power outages. Importantly, they didn't require electrical charging since they worked on chemical action. The only sticking point was going to be the actual replication: I needed lead, and in particular I needed acid. 

 

Where was I going to get acid? Industrial cleaning solution, maybe, Abraxo brand or something similar. Antifreeze. Coolant. I mulled that over for a bit. Coolant... before the war there was a service station just down the road from the development. I wondered if it was still intact. Probably looted long ago, but I decided to check it out anyway. I set out the next morning, following the crumbling remains of Liberty Street. It was there, just before the intersection with Lowell Road, that I saw the unmistakable marquee of a Red Rocket station.

 

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I wasn't alone at the Red Rocket. The whole place was crawling with fleshy critters that very clearly did not approve of my presence. If I had to describe them, I'd say they looked like a naked mole rat, but much, much bigger and much, much meaner. I suppose that makes sense though - I remember reading that naked mole rats are incredibly resistant to cancer. That's a trait that natural selection would highly favor in a nuclear wasteland. 

 

It wasn't just the moles, however. After I'd killed or scared off the last of them, a much more familiar animal greeted me. A gorgeous and very healthy looking German Shepard! I'd always wanted a dog, but every time I thought about adopting one something or another got in the way. I guess that day was when it was finally meant to happen, because from the first pat on the head he was incredibly friendly and eager. I don't think I could have turned him away even if I tried.

 

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With the dog following on my heels, we searched through the service station. Unfortunately, my intuition had been right and everything of value seemed to have already been looted. Just like in Sanctuary Hills, I found some hints that people had lived here at some point, but this place seemed to have been abandoned a long time ago. I did find some notes - left behind by the original occupants, I think - pointing to some kind of illegal dumping operation nearby. Using those notes as a guide, I searched the foot of the hillside behind the service station and found a small cave. After dealing with more mole rats, I searched through the refuse heap while doing my best to keep clear of anything obviously radioactive. 

 

I didn't quite get the motherload that I'd hoped for, but I found enough to serve my purposes. Feeding the loot into the Workshop, I punched in the catalog number for the battery and watched as it spat out several pieces, each marked with assembly instructions. Then I ordered up a couple standing lamps and a good length of conduit. From there, I set to work. I couldn't really get at the ceiling crawl space - there was too much damage and it was basically a confined space full of sharp objects. So instead I attached the conduit pieces directly into the drop ceiling, running them along the metal framing parts to try and avoid overstressing anything. I had to go back and fabricate some more conduit and some power cable, but I got everything hooked up in the end. Patching in the battery, I flipped the switch and watched the lamps come to life. 

 

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I was finally out of the dark. The battery was a temporary solution, of course, but I was pretty confident that if I used it sparingly I'd be able to get quite a few evenings of illumination out of it. That, in turn, would let me keep working longer and making more progress on rebuilding my humble little home.

 

 

 

Behind The Scenes

While I was getting rolling with this game, I'm going to try imposing some limits on myself - specifically, I'll initially start only building contemporary 2077 technology with the Workshop - no junk walls or rusty items - until I feel the game progress has reached a point where other items make logical sense, such as befriending or recruiting actors who could reasonably aid in the construction of such items. We'll see how this works out, but I'm hoping it'll have interesting results.

Edited by gregaaz

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