Part 4: The blind dogs of the sun in their running...
Part 4: The blind dogs of the sun in their running...
Previous: Part 3: The last to fall were the buildings, distant and solemn...
Mole rats. Disgusting creatures. I saw some down by the water recently, I steered clear of them. To be sure, they're easy kills, despite their penchant for burrowing through concrete and immediately popping up dozens of yards away as if they move faster while digging than in the open air. Clara and her newfound canine friend tear through a handful, and then Clara, exhibiting that can-do attitude we all know and... know, goes to the corpses and cuts bits of meat off and yanks out their teeth. This lady has a super-serious problem with hoarding, let me tell you. Just as she did back across the bridge in Sanctuary Hills, she proceeds to spend hours carefully going over every bit of ground and carefully grinding up old used tires, whole tree trunks, glass bottles, and pretty much anything she can get her hands on, storing the resultant junk in a bottomless container inside the gas station. To her, the mole rat teeth are just the icing on the cake.
Once she's finished clearing the area of anything not nailed down, and a few things that are nailed down, she continues walking on down the road. She wanders up to a pair of mosquitos who apparently found the National Buffout Stockpile and spent a few years ingesting, because whoa are those bugs big. As is her wont, after killing them she proceeds to rip the carcasses apart looking for anything edible. Lucky for me I don't have a stomach, or I'd get quite nauseous just being near her when she's in a scavenging mood.
Further into the town of Concord, and we start to hear gunfire. Or maybe it's just me that hears the gunfire. Any person with an IQ higher than single digits would probably be a tad hesitant to wade right into a bullet storm, but I guess that answers my question - she hears it too, she just can't be bothered to not try to get herself riddled with lead. She whips out her gun and starts shooting at some people who are shooting at other people, never considering the possibility that the first people are the good guys and the second people are the bad guys. It all turns out all right in the end, though, so I guess her luck played her a good one here too.
There's a building with a balcony up top, and a guy up there shouts to her to pick up a weapon off the ground and run inside for more fighting, and is there any purpose to me pointing out the lack of sound judgment exhibited by Clara anymore? She barely survived a firefight with a bunch of bandits outside where she could run away if things got bad, and now at the behest of someone she doesn't even know and barely saw for perhaps six seconds, she's running to join another battle, this time in cramped quarters and no knowledge of where enemies might be.
Luckily for her (yet again), these raiders seem to be operating in pairs at well-spaced intervals, so as not to give any invading vigilantes more than a token bit of resistance. I can imagine the conversation they had before the fight - "Okay, we know that if we all band together we can wipe them out without trouble, so let's split up into groups of two and go hide in corners so any itinerant do-gooders can kill us with minimal effort." Lucky for Clara, most of the raiders in the world are even less inclined to forethought than she is.
A handful of raiders later, and we meet up with Mr. Balcony again. His name is Preston Garvey, and he's heading up a group of refugees. None of them have guns, even though firearms are not in short supply, which seems a little odd considering that their lives are literally hinging on bringing enough firepower to bear on an attacking force of bloodthirsty maniacs. Perhaps they're all inveterate pacifists and would rather die than engage in self-defense. I try not to judge.
Preston and his sidekicks exhort Clara to go find a fusion core, which is apparently a superpowered battery capable of providing enough energy to run a small city for years without burning out yet can only run a suit of power armor for a few hours. They ask her to continue helping with the defense, which is a little odd considering that all of the raiders have already been killed off. Or so I thought... after all, she cleared the way to the building, no enemies left outside, and now the inside is completely safe too, right? But apparently something bad is out there anyway, according to the Crazy Old Lady who's convinced that something wicked this way comes.
Armed with the information that not only are more raiders inexplicably teleporting in to the area but a something "angry" is coming, because I'm sure the raiders aren't really angry, just mildly miffed - Clara heads up to the roof, steps into a busted-up suit of power armor, grabs a minigun off a derelict Vertibird, and jumps down to the ground, a tactical decision I question due to the fact that it puts her right at the proper range and angle to be flanked all the better. She starts shooting at the bandits, who start shooting back, and although she is currently wearing several inches of thick steel and a nuclear-powered exoskeleton, she's sure taking quite a lot of damage from those little homemade weapons. Still, she does manage to kill off most of the raiders. The remaining raiders are all set to die too, when out of a hole in the ground pops up the world's ugliest Jack-in-the-box, a horned monstrosity that would not look out of place in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
This beast, called a Deathclaw, proceeds to mow down the rest of the raiders, kick Dogmeat's ass, and take a huge amount of punishment from this ostensibly powerful weapon Clara's wielding before finally succumbing to, at my estimation, eleven thousand lead projectiles to the head and sternum. Clara, instead of using this God-given opportunity to rethink her current goals and objectives and give up on the outer world and return to her nice, safe freezer back in the vault, heads back in the building to talk to Preston & Co. who have, judging by the speed at which they've gathered in the lobby, either teleported or phased through solid matter to get there before she did.
After a brief argument where the Crazy Old Lady says crazy old lady things and the rest of the group (with one notable exception) agrees that the Crazy Old Lady is the universal Fount of Wisdom, everyone starts walking very very slowly to Sanctuary Hills, which according to the Crazy Old Lady is the safest place in the Commonwealth. Judging by its proximity to merciless raiders, insane robots, and subterranean horrors including mutant rats and furious deathclaws, I would have to disagree, but does anyone ever listen to me? No. Mostly because I can't actually speak, but the argument still stands.
Next: Part 5: You take your time, you do your work well...
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Author's note:
Mole Rats may be one of the weakest creatures found in the wasteland, but they still wig me out. Two sets of teeth? It may seem odd for an entity with no mouth, much less a single set of teeth, to be complaining about hyperdontia in subterranean rodents, but if we go down that road we'll end up asking how I can type up this diary without hands, so let's skip it, shall we?
Image: Each one of those slimy, dirty, disease-ridden rodents has been butchered and their meat stuffed into a pack, in case she gets a little peckish later on. She is the living embodiment of the word "revolting."
Have a question or comment for Vault Suit? Tie it to a raven's leg, and release the raven to the East Winds, while saying a small prayer and burning an effigy of the Pip-Boy.
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