A cyborg in the Wasteland [Fallout] [Self-insert]
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Odd1todd89
The strange tightrope
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Grace's Grenadiers
She met them with her two borrowed bots at the southern edge of town at sunrise. The Assaultron walked at her side, scanning the surroundings carefully, and the mindless hover-bot-of-burden trailed behind her. Lily planned to build her version of this innovative tool of the wasteland. Still, until she could find some more Mr Handy parts, she may have to construct something using multiple salvaged Eyebot levitation fields. Maybe as many as a half dozen. She didn't really know how that would work out or if it would at all.
The small group of four mercenaries was led by an Amazon named Grace, who was of indeterminate ethnicity but featured vaguely Eurasian facial features, eyes combined with a pleasant caramel skin tone. The brunette was easily over 185cm tall and featured a short pixie cut haircut that smoothed out her rough image, at least when she wasn't kitted out in full combat gear with it hidden under a K-pot like she was now.
She was a striking woman, and while Lily wouldn't call her pretty, she was attractive in the magnetic sense that people seemed to want to be around her. Moreover, she was a leader in many of the ways that Lily herself was not and likely would never be.
Grace's group of mercenaries had no name
but privately, Lily called them Grace's Grenadiers because she felt it was a pity to ignore the naming convention of small mercenary bands. It had to be named after the captain and follow the initial from the captain's first name!
Lily considered what her hypothetical mercenary band would be called, but the only thing she could think of was Lily's Labourers, which was a bit on the nose as to what Lily probably would use them for the most. An entrenching tool would be standard load-out!
Grace's subordinates were all men, which probably said something positive about her competence and strength, Lily thought. Ideals like sexual egalitarianism seemed to have fallen a bit to the wayside in the apocalypse, which meant that Grace was probably better than a similar man in her position. A giant blonde man named New John, a black man, named Big John and an Asian man that called himself Tangent.
When they had been introduced, Lily had asked him if his name was a calculus reference and immediately regretted it when the man replied that, yes, sometimes they do scavenge calculators, but he never saw a brand named Tangent.
She wasn't entirely sure of the story of the other two, but apparently, New John just recently signed on to replace a casualty whose name was also John. To keep their original two Johns separate, one was called Big John and the other Little John. Even though this new guy was way bigger than Big John, he was attached to the name. So the littlest John was Big John, and the biggest John was New John.
Lily could see them come to attention when she was about fifty meters out, holding their weapons at a low ready position until they identified her.
Grace yelled, "'Hoy, Doc. Is that a damn Assaultron?!"
Lily waved but waited until they were closer before replying, "Ah, yes, Ms Grace. A dear friend was kind enough to loan it to me with orders to protect me. I am rebuilding one myself, but it tried to murder me when I started it up the first time, so I must have crossed a wire somewhere, eh? Sadly, it doesn't have the huge laser, but it is strong and fast."
Grace chuckled and shook her head, "Well, it's a shame we can't give it general orders, but if it is on VIP protection duty, then... you will head up the rear for sure, and if someone threatens our rear, the Assaultron will see them and tear them a new asshole while precisely following his orders to protect you, sound OK? What's that hovering abomination?"
Lily smiled, as that was her plan also. Although she was lying by omission when she implied she couldn't give it orders. But, she always liked it when people she cooperated with were intelligent, "Yes, that sounds ideal. And this used to be a Mister Handy; about all that is left is the propulsion system. It's got a little sensor that will just follow whoever is in front of it like a baby duck; it is basically a pack mule. Top speed of about fifteen klicks an hour and can carry five hundred kilos. I figure we can all have him carry all our packs, minus things that we need to have on hand fast. Then he can carry all the loot back to Canterbury Commons while we hump our packs on the return leg."
Grace tilted her head to one side and grinned broadly, "That's great Doc! That will really increase our haul on this trip, not to mention making getting there a lot quicker and less of a pain. Although I'm not sure what a duck is." She considered something and then said, "Doc gets an extra share for this contribution to the mission, objections?"
Her men sounded off in a chorus of "Nah", "No, boss", and "Sounds good."
Grace nodded and came to stand next to Lily, "Alright, quick before we head out. Gear check; it's not that I don't trust you to bring everything you should, but you said this was your first time in D.C., so... I guess I don't trust you, but I don't mean anything bad by it."
Lily laughed genuinely. If she were bothered by gear checks, she wouldn't have made it through basic in her past life. They spent about five or ten minutes going over everything she packed. Grace seemed somewhat impressed, with the possible exception of her primary weapon, the carbine.
Grace clucked her tongue and asked, "How good a shot are you, Doc?"
Lily considered that. She had something like 20/5 vision and proprioception that was superior to 99% of the population, "Pretty good, I think. I took down three raiders at about two hundred meters in six shots with this carbine."
Grace nodded and said, "That's better than N.J., then," while ignoring a half-hearted, "Hey!" from the new guy.
She offered Lily a rifle. It looked like a Remington-style bolt-action hunting rifle, complete with a scope of decent magnification. "I'll lend you this. It used to be Little John's before he kicked the bucket. Me and he operated as kind of the designated marksmen of the squad," she hefted her own rifle, which was a tricked-out Russian-looking semi-automatic military marksman rifle rather than just a hunting rifle.
Grace continued, "Our main advantage to raiders beyond their general stupidity is that we can pick them off at range. And if we do, for some reason, run into a Super Mutant, then we'll need the extra armour piercing of a full-sized cartridge. I don't think a short-barreled carbine as you got will cut it unless you're a lot closer than you'd ever want to be to one of the bastards. I once saw one beat a man to death with one of those extra tall stop signs, one-handed. Sound good?"
Lily nodded. Even if she was just doing one or two jobs as a part-timer, Grace was her boss right now, so she would show respect. However, she couldn't help but try to tease her a little bit. She came to attention, then clicked her heels together Colonel Klink-style before sounding off, "Ma'am, yes, ma'am! Ma'am, this recruit has a question about our rules of engagement, ma'am!"
Grace grinned and swatted her on the rear, and she felt a sting even through her impact-resistant bodysuit. Lily felt her face heat up faintly before hopping out of range, hand going to guard herself while both Johns laughed at her. Grace answered, "None of that shit, please. We're mercs, not the bloody Enclave. But, sure. Guys, listen up, too."
The men assumed a lazy, almost parade-rest pose but kept their attention on Grace. She continued, "Our target is the University of Maryland satellite campus. That makes it sound like a tiny office, but they just called it that for legal reasons because it was in D.C. and not Maryland. It is a pretty big campus, covering about six blocks. It's west of the National Guard Depot which we want to keep a wide berth away from, and about five blocks north of the Galaxy News Radio building... which we also want to keep away from as that is a popular battleground between the Brotherhood and the muties. We want to avoid both, and we especially want to avoid incidentally being killed in their cross-fire."
She glanced at everybody, in turn, to make sure everybody understood. Lily hoped she wasn't blushing anymore and nodded, trying to seem serious. Grace smiled, "I'm not sure we have any of what you'd call RoEs, but we do have tactics and contingencies. Our strategy, unlike a proper military unit, is always to survive. Therefore all the tactics we employ are to see that strategy is enacted."
Grace held up a single finger, "Generally, if we see raiders, we'll drop them at the highest range we can set up, from ambush. Unless they are entrenched or we are vastly outnumbered, then we hide and avoid them. That's the worst of what we're expecting."
She raised a second figure, "We see ANY shinies, that is to say, infantry in Power Armour, we immediately hide and avoid until we can identify them. The Brotherhood generally won't hassle mercs that are obviously switched on and have their heads on swivels. We're obviously not raiders. But the Enclave will generally shoot us on sight. But they rarely operate in D.C. If they do, they are almost always inserted and extracted in Vertibirds, so it's easy to see them coming and avoiding. By the way, there is a standard reward from the Brotherhood to report any Enclave in their AO, which basically is D.C. If they DO attack us, we take cover, use grenades and then try for headshots with AP ammo while looking for a way to run that they can't or won't follow. Even a fireteam of two of the bastards will tear us to pieces in a stand-up fight just on account of the disparity in armour and firepower. Other teams have succeeded in luring them into a prepared kill box and then killing them through command-detonated H.E., but then again, they might have been bullshitting me. Explosives are the best bet, as the Power Armour still has trouble fully protecting a person from concussive shock waves, even if it will stop shrapnel and small arms."
She said the last solemnly. Then she raised a third finger, "Muties, well, that's actually similar as the Enclave. Treat them as of comparable danger but much stupider. Hide, if they attack, we do concentrated fire at long range, then do a mass grenade attack at 20 meters or so as they rush us and then go for headshots. Three or four close frag grenades will put down your average Super Mutant. And they tend to try to close to short range even if they are carrying a Gatling laser and could keep us suppressed and chew us up at range with it. How's your throwing arm, girlie?"
She grinned and then nodded, "That's enough for now; when we get to the target, we'll discuss our standard tactics for clearing buildings, too. But it'd be harder to understand before we can run you through it once or twice."
We set a good pace, slowing to watch the Assaultron tear a group of giant ants to pieces near the ruined car factory south of Vault 108. It had taken me over six hours to reach the town from 108, but we passed it in barely over an hour today.
During the hike, Grace taught Lily some of their normal formations, call-outs to use if she saw enemies when to shoot before even calling them out and other SOPs, although Grace denied that they were procedures at all and called them guidelines.
The group reached the outskirts of D.C. at about mid-day, and their pace slowed to a stealthy crawl.
Lily suddenly came to a stop and called out, "Contact little less than a half a klick ahead of us, raiders, I think. Three or four men of military age, at arms. By the burned-out 18-wheeler."
The others came to a quick stop, semi-crouched. Grace called out, "All around defence, guys. Girlie, up here." The three other guys turned to the sides and behind us, their weapons held at a high-ready position.
Grace whistled appreciatively as she sighted down the street with her rifle, "You got eyes like an eagle or something, girlie. There are six, though. We'll do this together, at your own pace. I'll work in from the left after your first shot, you the right."
Lily grinned and assumed a kneeling firing position, supporting the rifle with the hood of a wrecked car, "Is that my code-name? Girlie?"
Lily searched for a target, finding the group of obvious raiders. Her target on the far right had a pair of human skulls as pauldrons.
A snort came from next to her, and an amused voice said drily, "If you want."
Lily slowed her breathing. She was never really a sniper, but her grandpa in her past life had taught her how to fire a rifle almost since she could hold one in her hands. This wouldn't be close to the farthest shot she's ever taken.
She made some assumptions about what range the rifle was zeroed to and placed the reticle slightly above her target's head, which she hoped would generate a hit at centre mass. She held her breath and slowly squeezed the trigger, hoping to surprise herself with the report of the shot. Grace fired immediately after her.
She quickly worked the rifle's action and started to look for her first target when she heard Grace fire again. Finding her first target down, she shifted left and found one confused-looking man holding some kind of assault rifle. She placed her reticle again and squeezed the trigger. After loading another round, she saw that she missed, and her target was kneeling down, taking cover behind a car but taking cover from the wrong direction. Couldn't he hear the shots? Or was he just confused in the fog of battle? She carefully placed the reticle this time and fired.
Grace stopped her when she was about to search for the next target by clapping her companionably on the shoulder, "Nice shooting, girlie, they're all down. Three shots, two hits. Not bad. We could make a sniper out of you, perhaps!" Wait, had she taken out the other 4 in that time? She stopped noticing each individual shot Grace took when she was busy herself. She supposed her making three shots to Grace's four, perhaps, was pretty good when you considered her rifle was semi-auto. But then she remembered she didn't realize how long Grace was watching her line up the last shot. Still, she smiled stupidly at the praise, "Ahaha, th-thanks."
The Assaultron looked disgruntled, almost as if it wasn't pleased that it could not simultaneously kill those men while also complying with the command to stay within a certain distance of her.
They skulked over, staying at a bit of a distance before they were sure there wasn't a second raider team they didn't notice that would ambush them when they checked on their dead comrades before seeing if there was any loot. A couple of salable rifles in middling shape plus one hunting rifle in terrible condition but a lot of ammunition for it, of the latter Lily, took right away.
They came to a stop near a subway entrance. The road ahead was close to impossible. Grace whispered, "We're pretty close, but we have to bypass the next block. If we go around east, we will get way too close to the National Guard depot. So we'll bypass through the subway line. Probably no raiders down there, but expect feral ghouls and other beasties. Johns on point, girlie; this is our main formation when we're in a semi-enclosed space with multiple avenues of attack on us. You'll face our rear and walk backwards. We'll move no faster than at your pace. Don't turn around if you hear us firing because those sounds are what will get a feral to run up on us from behind. We are a train, right? And you're the caboose. Ditch the rifle, grab your carbine."
Lily was surprised. This was Spec Ops formation shit; she hadn't expected these guys to act so professionally. She certainly didn't feel qualified to be doing any of this, but she had played Modern Warfare, so she was familiar with the concept, even if she felt like an imposter for trying to pull it off.
After they descended the stairs, she took her position. She was wondering what the Assaultron would do; normally, it walked next to her. It seemed confused for a moment, staring at her, walking backwards, then staring at the rest of the team, then back at her. Would it walk backwards too? She kind of wanted to see it.
No. But it did slow down, allowing Lily to get in front of it, presumably so any enemies would have to go through it first to get to Lily, and every few moments, it turned its head to scan the area behind them.
They had already switched follow the leader targets on the hover bot of burden to Grace, so it was actually hovering next to her, and she hoped it wouldn't get in the way if there was combat. It was really stupid. It would follow a ghoul back into its nest if you let it.
Grace was guiding her so she didn't either back up too fast or go off course, keeping a hand firmly on Lily's lower back.
Grace's hand seemed really big, and it was quite strong, wasn't it? Lily flushed at her thoughts. Way to get distracted and possibly eaten by ghouls, Lily. Real professional.
"Contact. Mole rats, ahead," the bigger man named Little John said, followed by several single, and she assumed well-aimed, shots. It took a serious force of will not to immediately turn around herself, but it was a good idea that she didn't because several ghouls, including one Bright One, shambled out of some of the twisty maintenance corridors on either side and started shambling with an unsettling speed towards her.
She brought her carbine up quickly and reported in what a mean person might describe as a girly shriek of terror, "Three ghouls, one Bright One rear! Assaultron, get the Bright One!"
As soon as the ghouls appeared, the Assaultron had frozen. She knew for a fact it didn't have any sensors in the back, so she was intellectually curious about what clue triggered that reaction. Its digital voice said, sounding gleeful, "Defensive protocols engaged," and turned around quickly and began running at the ghouls at about the same time Lily called out. When she told it to attack the Bright One, it shifted its run to the left, crouched and leapt at the radioactive ghoul.
Lily aimed at the centre of one of the ghouls rushing her and squeezed the trigger. She was on full auto, so she at least had the foresight to keep her aim point low so that the recoil from the short burst walked its way up the ghoul's chest and struck its head in a quick rat-a-tat-tat.
Holy shit, the Assaultron had already decapitated the Bright One and turned on the next nearest ghoul. She shifted her aim to the last ghoul that was still rushing her but Grace, who had turned around when she was killing the first one, performed a Mozambique drill with her pistol, giving it two rounds to the chest and one to the head.
She watched it fall before glancing at the Assaultron, who was finishing the last ghoul off by... what the fuck! It was holding the ghoul's own severed arm in its claw and was beating the ghoul to death with it, which didn't take long.
"Hostiles neutralized," it reported, its slightly feminine digital voice sounding smug.
Lily glanced at Grace, who also looked a little shocked, then back at the Assaultron. Considering something, Lily gave the Assaultron an order, "Assaultron, disable psyops demoralization protocol. New ROE requires the most rapid and efficient take-downs possible. Acknowledge."
The Assaultron gazed at her, and seemed a bit disappointed, "Acknowledged, no fun protocols engaged." She hadn't known that there was a demoralization protocol, actually. She made a wild-ass guess, but then again, this was the Fallout universe, so of course, the assault robot designed for the US Army had psyop protocols.
There were no more rear attacks, but the boys put down a few more molerats and ghouls before they got to the stairs up to the surface.
The team paused before heading up to the stairs, and Grace gave her a cheerful smile, "Good job, girlie. I won't jinx us by suggesting what we'll find up there, but we aren't expecting too much in the way of threats." She had a nice smile; she should smile more, Lily thought.
The small group of four mercenaries was led by an Amazon named Grace, who was of indeterminate ethnicity but featured vaguely Eurasian facial features, eyes combined with a pleasant caramel skin tone. The brunette was easily over 185cm tall and featured a short pixie cut haircut that smoothed out her rough image, at least when she wasn't kitted out in full combat gear with it hidden under a K-pot like she was now.
She was a striking woman, and while Lily wouldn't call her pretty, she was attractive in the magnetic sense that people seemed to want to be around her. Moreover, she was a leader in many of the ways that Lily herself was not and likely would never be.
Grace's group of mercenaries had no name
but privately, Lily called them Grace's Grenadiers because she felt it was a pity to ignore the naming convention of small mercenary bands. It had to be named after the captain and follow the initial from the captain's first name!
Lily considered what her hypothetical mercenary band would be called, but the only thing she could think of was Lily's Labourers, which was a bit on the nose as to what Lily probably would use them for the most. An entrenching tool would be standard load-out!
Grace's subordinates were all men, which probably said something positive about her competence and strength, Lily thought. Ideals like sexual egalitarianism seemed to have fallen a bit to the wayside in the apocalypse, which meant that Grace was probably better than a similar man in her position. A giant blonde man named New John, a black man, named Big John and an Asian man that called himself Tangent.
When they had been introduced, Lily had asked him if his name was a calculus reference and immediately regretted it when the man replied that, yes, sometimes they do scavenge calculators, but he never saw a brand named Tangent.
She wasn't entirely sure of the story of the other two, but apparently, New John just recently signed on to replace a casualty whose name was also John. To keep their original two Johns separate, one was called Big John and the other Little John. Even though this new guy was way bigger than Big John, he was attached to the name. So the littlest John was Big John, and the biggest John was New John.
Lily could see them come to attention when she was about fifty meters out, holding their weapons at a low ready position until they identified her.
Grace yelled, "'Hoy, Doc. Is that a damn Assaultron?!"
Lily waved but waited until they were closer before replying, "Ah, yes, Ms Grace. A dear friend was kind enough to loan it to me with orders to protect me. I am rebuilding one myself, but it tried to murder me when I started it up the first time, so I must have crossed a wire somewhere, eh? Sadly, it doesn't have the huge laser, but it is strong and fast."
Grace chuckled and shook her head, "Well, it's a shame we can't give it general orders, but if it is on VIP protection duty, then... you will head up the rear for sure, and if someone threatens our rear, the Assaultron will see them and tear them a new asshole while precisely following his orders to protect you, sound OK? What's that hovering abomination?"
Lily smiled, as that was her plan also. Although she was lying by omission when she implied she couldn't give it orders. But, she always liked it when people she cooperated with were intelligent, "Yes, that sounds ideal. And this used to be a Mister Handy; about all that is left is the propulsion system. It's got a little sensor that will just follow whoever is in front of it like a baby duck; it is basically a pack mule. Top speed of about fifteen klicks an hour and can carry five hundred kilos. I figure we can all have him carry all our packs, minus things that we need to have on hand fast. Then he can carry all the loot back to Canterbury Commons while we hump our packs on the return leg."
Grace tilted her head to one side and grinned broadly, "That's great Doc! That will really increase our haul on this trip, not to mention making getting there a lot quicker and less of a pain. Although I'm not sure what a duck is." She considered something and then said, "Doc gets an extra share for this contribution to the mission, objections?"
Her men sounded off in a chorus of "Nah", "No, boss", and "Sounds good."
Grace nodded and came to stand next to Lily, "Alright, quick before we head out. Gear check; it's not that I don't trust you to bring everything you should, but you said this was your first time in D.C., so... I guess I don't trust you, but I don't mean anything bad by it."
Lily laughed genuinely. If she were bothered by gear checks, she wouldn't have made it through basic in her past life. They spent about five or ten minutes going over everything she packed. Grace seemed somewhat impressed, with the possible exception of her primary weapon, the carbine.
Grace clucked her tongue and asked, "How good a shot are you, Doc?"
Lily considered that. She had something like 20/5 vision and proprioception that was superior to 99% of the population, "Pretty good, I think. I took down three raiders at about two hundred meters in six shots with this carbine."
Grace nodded and said, "That's better than N.J., then," while ignoring a half-hearted, "Hey!" from the new guy.
She offered Lily a rifle. It looked like a Remington-style bolt-action hunting rifle, complete with a scope of decent magnification. "I'll lend you this. It used to be Little John's before he kicked the bucket. Me and he operated as kind of the designated marksmen of the squad," she hefted her own rifle, which was a tricked-out Russian-looking semi-automatic military marksman rifle rather than just a hunting rifle.
Grace continued, "Our main advantage to raiders beyond their general stupidity is that we can pick them off at range. And if we do, for some reason, run into a Super Mutant, then we'll need the extra armour piercing of a full-sized cartridge. I don't think a short-barreled carbine as you got will cut it unless you're a lot closer than you'd ever want to be to one of the bastards. I once saw one beat a man to death with one of those extra tall stop signs, one-handed. Sound good?"
Lily nodded. Even if she was just doing one or two jobs as a part-timer, Grace was her boss right now, so she would show respect. However, she couldn't help but try to tease her a little bit. She came to attention, then clicked her heels together Colonel Klink-style before sounding off, "Ma'am, yes, ma'am! Ma'am, this recruit has a question about our rules of engagement, ma'am!"
Grace grinned and swatted her on the rear, and she felt a sting even through her impact-resistant bodysuit. Lily felt her face heat up faintly before hopping out of range, hand going to guard herself while both Johns laughed at her. Grace answered, "None of that shit, please. We're mercs, not the bloody Enclave. But, sure. Guys, listen up, too."
The men assumed a lazy, almost parade-rest pose but kept their attention on Grace. She continued, "Our target is the University of Maryland satellite campus. That makes it sound like a tiny office, but they just called it that for legal reasons because it was in D.C. and not Maryland. It is a pretty big campus, covering about six blocks. It's west of the National Guard Depot which we want to keep a wide berth away from, and about five blocks north of the Galaxy News Radio building... which we also want to keep away from as that is a popular battleground between the Brotherhood and the muties. We want to avoid both, and we especially want to avoid incidentally being killed in their cross-fire."
She glanced at everybody, in turn, to make sure everybody understood. Lily hoped she wasn't blushing anymore and nodded, trying to seem serious. Grace smiled, "I'm not sure we have any of what you'd call RoEs, but we do have tactics and contingencies. Our strategy, unlike a proper military unit, is always to survive. Therefore all the tactics we employ are to see that strategy is enacted."
Grace held up a single finger, "Generally, if we see raiders, we'll drop them at the highest range we can set up, from ambush. Unless they are entrenched or we are vastly outnumbered, then we hide and avoid them. That's the worst of what we're expecting."
She raised a second figure, "We see ANY shinies, that is to say, infantry in Power Armour, we immediately hide and avoid until we can identify them. The Brotherhood generally won't hassle mercs that are obviously switched on and have their heads on swivels. We're obviously not raiders. But the Enclave will generally shoot us on sight. But they rarely operate in D.C. If they do, they are almost always inserted and extracted in Vertibirds, so it's easy to see them coming and avoiding. By the way, there is a standard reward from the Brotherhood to report any Enclave in their AO, which basically is D.C. If they DO attack us, we take cover, use grenades and then try for headshots with AP ammo while looking for a way to run that they can't or won't follow. Even a fireteam of two of the bastards will tear us to pieces in a stand-up fight just on account of the disparity in armour and firepower. Other teams have succeeded in luring them into a prepared kill box and then killing them through command-detonated H.E., but then again, they might have been bullshitting me. Explosives are the best bet, as the Power Armour still has trouble fully protecting a person from concussive shock waves, even if it will stop shrapnel and small arms."
She said the last solemnly. Then she raised a third finger, "Muties, well, that's actually similar as the Enclave. Treat them as of comparable danger but much stupider. Hide, if they attack, we do concentrated fire at long range, then do a mass grenade attack at 20 meters or so as they rush us and then go for headshots. Three or four close frag grenades will put down your average Super Mutant. And they tend to try to close to short range even if they are carrying a Gatling laser and could keep us suppressed and chew us up at range with it. How's your throwing arm, girlie?"
She grinned and then nodded, "That's enough for now; when we get to the target, we'll discuss our standard tactics for clearing buildings, too. But it'd be harder to understand before we can run you through it once or twice."
We set a good pace, slowing to watch the Assaultron tear a group of giant ants to pieces near the ruined car factory south of Vault 108. It had taken me over six hours to reach the town from 108, but we passed it in barely over an hour today.
During the hike, Grace taught Lily some of their normal formations, call-outs to use if she saw enemies when to shoot before even calling them out and other SOPs, although Grace denied that they were procedures at all and called them guidelines.
The group reached the outskirts of D.C. at about mid-day, and their pace slowed to a stealthy crawl.
Lily suddenly came to a stop and called out, "Contact little less than a half a klick ahead of us, raiders, I think. Three or four men of military age, at arms. By the burned-out 18-wheeler."
The others came to a quick stop, semi-crouched. Grace called out, "All around defence, guys. Girlie, up here." The three other guys turned to the sides and behind us, their weapons held at a high-ready position.
Grace whistled appreciatively as she sighted down the street with her rifle, "You got eyes like an eagle or something, girlie. There are six, though. We'll do this together, at your own pace. I'll work in from the left after your first shot, you the right."
Lily grinned and assumed a kneeling firing position, supporting the rifle with the hood of a wrecked car, "Is that my code-name? Girlie?"
Lily searched for a target, finding the group of obvious raiders. Her target on the far right had a pair of human skulls as pauldrons.
A snort came from next to her, and an amused voice said drily, "If you want."
Lily slowed her breathing. She was never really a sniper, but her grandpa in her past life had taught her how to fire a rifle almost since she could hold one in her hands. This wouldn't be close to the farthest shot she's ever taken.
She made some assumptions about what range the rifle was zeroed to and placed the reticle slightly above her target's head, which she hoped would generate a hit at centre mass. She held her breath and slowly squeezed the trigger, hoping to surprise herself with the report of the shot. Grace fired immediately after her.
She quickly worked the rifle's action and started to look for her first target when she heard Grace fire again. Finding her first target down, she shifted left and found one confused-looking man holding some kind of assault rifle. She placed her reticle again and squeezed the trigger. After loading another round, she saw that she missed, and her target was kneeling down, taking cover behind a car but taking cover from the wrong direction. Couldn't he hear the shots? Or was he just confused in the fog of battle? She carefully placed the reticle this time and fired.
Grace stopped her when she was about to search for the next target by clapping her companionably on the shoulder, "Nice shooting, girlie, they're all down. Three shots, two hits. Not bad. We could make a sniper out of you, perhaps!" Wait, had she taken out the other 4 in that time? She stopped noticing each individual shot Grace took when she was busy herself. She supposed her making three shots to Grace's four, perhaps, was pretty good when you considered her rifle was semi-auto. But then she remembered she didn't realize how long Grace was watching her line up the last shot. Still, she smiled stupidly at the praise, "Ahaha, th-thanks."
The Assaultron looked disgruntled, almost as if it wasn't pleased that it could not simultaneously kill those men while also complying with the command to stay within a certain distance of her.
They skulked over, staying at a bit of a distance before they were sure there wasn't a second raider team they didn't notice that would ambush them when they checked on their dead comrades before seeing if there was any loot. A couple of salable rifles in middling shape plus one hunting rifle in terrible condition but a lot of ammunition for it, of the latter Lily, took right away.
They came to a stop near a subway entrance. The road ahead was close to impossible. Grace whispered, "We're pretty close, but we have to bypass the next block. If we go around east, we will get way too close to the National Guard depot. So we'll bypass through the subway line. Probably no raiders down there, but expect feral ghouls and other beasties. Johns on point, girlie; this is our main formation when we're in a semi-enclosed space with multiple avenues of attack on us. You'll face our rear and walk backwards. We'll move no faster than at your pace. Don't turn around if you hear us firing because those sounds are what will get a feral to run up on us from behind. We are a train, right? And you're the caboose. Ditch the rifle, grab your carbine."
Lily was surprised. This was Spec Ops formation shit; she hadn't expected these guys to act so professionally. She certainly didn't feel qualified to be doing any of this, but she had played Modern Warfare, so she was familiar with the concept, even if she felt like an imposter for trying to pull it off.
After they descended the stairs, she took her position. She was wondering what the Assaultron would do; normally, it walked next to her. It seemed confused for a moment, staring at her, walking backwards, then staring at the rest of the team, then back at her. Would it walk backwards too? She kind of wanted to see it.
No. But it did slow down, allowing Lily to get in front of it, presumably so any enemies would have to go through it first to get to Lily, and every few moments, it turned its head to scan the area behind them.
They had already switched follow the leader targets on the hover bot of burden to Grace, so it was actually hovering next to her, and she hoped it wouldn't get in the way if there was combat. It was really stupid. It would follow a ghoul back into its nest if you let it.
Grace was guiding her so she didn't either back up too fast or go off course, keeping a hand firmly on Lily's lower back.
Grace's hand seemed really big, and it was quite strong, wasn't it? Lily flushed at her thoughts. Way to get distracted and possibly eaten by ghouls, Lily. Real professional.
"Contact. Mole rats, ahead," the bigger man named Little John said, followed by several single, and she assumed well-aimed, shots. It took a serious force of will not to immediately turn around herself, but it was a good idea that she didn't because several ghouls, including one Bright One, shambled out of some of the twisty maintenance corridors on either side and started shambling with an unsettling speed towards her.
She brought her carbine up quickly and reported in what a mean person might describe as a girly shriek of terror, "Three ghouls, one Bright One rear! Assaultron, get the Bright One!"
As soon as the ghouls appeared, the Assaultron had frozen. She knew for a fact it didn't have any sensors in the back, so she was intellectually curious about what clue triggered that reaction. Its digital voice said, sounding gleeful, "Defensive protocols engaged," and turned around quickly and began running at the ghouls at about the same time Lily called out. When she told it to attack the Bright One, it shifted its run to the left, crouched and leapt at the radioactive ghoul.
Lily aimed at the centre of one of the ghouls rushing her and squeezed the trigger. She was on full auto, so she at least had the foresight to keep her aim point low so that the recoil from the short burst walked its way up the ghoul's chest and struck its head in a quick rat-a-tat-tat.
Holy shit, the Assaultron had already decapitated the Bright One and turned on the next nearest ghoul. She shifted her aim to the last ghoul that was still rushing her but Grace, who had turned around when she was killing the first one, performed a Mozambique drill with her pistol, giving it two rounds to the chest and one to the head.
She watched it fall before glancing at the Assaultron, who was finishing the last ghoul off by... what the fuck! It was holding the ghoul's own severed arm in its claw and was beating the ghoul to death with it, which didn't take long.
"Hostiles neutralized," it reported, its slightly feminine digital voice sounding smug.
Lily glanced at Grace, who also looked a little shocked, then back at the Assaultron. Considering something, Lily gave the Assaultron an order, "Assaultron, disable psyops demoralization protocol. New ROE requires the most rapid and efficient take-downs possible. Acknowledge."
The Assaultron gazed at her, and seemed a bit disappointed, "Acknowledged, no fun protocols engaged." She hadn't known that there was a demoralization protocol, actually. She made a wild-ass guess, but then again, this was the Fallout universe, so of course, the assault robot designed for the US Army had psyop protocols.
There were no more rear attacks, but the boys put down a few more molerats and ghouls before they got to the stairs up to the surface.
The team paused before heading up to the stairs, and Grace gave her a cheerful smile, "Good job, girlie. I won't jinx us by suggesting what we'll find up there, but we aren't expecting too much in the way of threats." She had a nice smile; she should smile more, Lily thought.
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RavenWolffe77
The Marauder series is the best BattleMech.
- Location
- Deep Periphery, A Long Way From The Inner Sphere
Some minor POV errors; is Lily supposed to be written in first or third person? She's written in both here.
Third person. I'll re-read this chapter. The only caveat is when I intentionally write her doing a internal monologue thought verbatim. Normally I just describe what she is thinking, but occasionally I write the literal thought she is having but I try to make that clear by including something after like '<thought>, she thought / she internally groused / etc'. I do this to provide special emphasis to these thoughts, so it should be somewhat rare. Perhaps I should italicize them?
That said tense errors are my most common error because as I write I generally am thinking of what to write in the 1st person, but I tend to prefer writing in the 3rd person yet still have POV characters even if it is 3rd person. I have no idea if that is how you should do it or not, I fly airplanes and have a computer science degree and my only knowledge about English writing comes from reading a lot of fiction
Edit: I re-read the chapter and found a gaggle of errors but mostly were punctuation, grammar, few missing or double words (like 'her her ...'), etc.
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KillerFish
Grumpy Owl, Bird Lawyer
"Jeeze, first I'm not allowed to get too far from this lady, and next I can't run the fun protocols! Am I going to have to ignore the orphan dropkicking options next?!"
Yeah, that was one of the errors I caught when I re-read this chapter so I changed it for clarity:
Although beating someone to death with YOUR OWN severed arm would, arguably, freak people out even more.
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Think you were going on a bit of a tangent here.
I'll just let myself out
I'll just let myself out
Quinn Porthos
Multiclass Munchkin
- Location
- Wandering
Get more loot if instead of a Handy chassis, you stick a pair of the floater units, (or maybe a trio for stability) on an armored shopping cart.
True Metal Power
Lisa: The Hintful
- Location
- Russia
I dunno, lesbian main characters are not a bad thing per se, but here on SV/SB it often feels like fanservice and pandering for neckbeards who would feel uncomfortable with protagonist being interested in males.
Rule 2: Don’t Be Hateful
Honestly M/F relationships I'd accept is something unrealistic like asfolfo he's super girly and shows no male characteristics but is a male.
What I'm trying to say is i only tolerate super girly traps.
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Astolfo is top tier.
This is a bit of a spoiler I guess but
she isn't a lesbian, she is just attracted to a certain type of person (tall, strong, competent leadership-types) so it's a bit more likely any further relationships (and romance isn't planned to be a big part of the story, honestly) would be of the "traditional" M/F type. Put another way, of women she is only attracted to prideful tomboys. There definitely will be male love interests.
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KillerFish
Grumpy Owl, Bird Lawyer
As an Aromantic Asexual, I find the incessant need to pair people up in relationships weird, regardless of the gender of each of the participants.
But I understand, on an intellectual level at least, that most people work better emotionally with a counterbalance, so it's not like romantic partners for the MC are something that puts me off a decently written fic.
So my take on this is: let Doc Lilly find love (if she wants), in whatever form it takes.
But I understand, on an intellectual level at least, that most people work better emotionally with a counterbalance, so it's not like romantic partners for the MC are something that puts me off a decently written fic.
So my take on this is: let Doc Lilly find love (if she wants), in whatever form it takes.
Matilda
"So, our main targets for this trip are working computer parts, electronics in general, power systems like energy and micro fusion cells and fission batteries. In other words, low-weight, high-value items that are easily convertible into caps," Grace said as they walked up the stairs.
"However, since we got the hover bot to carry most everything else, we can also get some personal items that we can take back ourselves, but only if they don't fall into the previous categories. If they do, then you can still keep them, but you have to buy them from the venture, at a discount, either with caps right away or with portions of your share," Grace continued, then her voice got serious, "So, everything we cart off has to be known to all the rest of us, just to keep everybody fair."
Everyone nodded, but Lily tilted her head to the side. Grace seemed to be implying that they would be doing some searching not as a group, "We are going to split up?" Her voice made it clear what she thought about that idea.
Grace made the universal hand-waffling motion, "Yes, and no. We will work building by building; we will completely clear it first quickly, and then when we've agreed the danger is minimal, we'll generally use the buddy system and split up to gather things faster in separate areas. You'll probably be by yourself since you have Little Miss Murderbot with you." The Assaultron seemed to approve of this designation, if her body language was any guide. Grace dug out three things from her pack and handed one of them to Lily, then the next to Big John.
Lily glanced down at it; it was hand-held radio. Although it seemed bigger than it needed to be, it was about the size of one of those old Motorola brick-style phones. It was way better than Vietnam-era military radios, but the main thing keeping those big was the shitty batteries of that era. Grace warned each of them, "I'd say be careful with these, but they're actually strong enough to withstand a bomb blast and still work -- I know because we found them in a blown up pre-war Vertibird. So, what I really mean is don't fucking lose them. This kind of tech is almost impossible to find these days. Even with all that we're going to take if we lose one of these, we're at a net loss this trip." She glanced straight at Lily, "You know what this is? Do you need help figuring it out?"
Lily shook her head, "Hand-held radio." She inspected the device. Nothing designed to work for the average soldier would be insanely complicated. She easily found the on/off, volume, push-to-talk, squelch and frequency selection dials. "Seems pretty straightforward, but what is this?" Lily indicated a small circular gauge that looked like a clock on the front of the device, next to the speaker grill, except it just had a minute hand.
Grace stared at her hard for what seemed like a long time, which caused Lily to feel a bit self-conscious. Then Lily realized that maybe most people have never seen a hand-held radio in the grimdark future of Fallout. Even most radios in the game looked more like ham-radio sets. Still, Grace didn't mention it but smiled after a moment, "Ah, that's the coolest thing about these. It has an automatic direction finder built-in. So while the radio is receiving a broadcast, that needle will point to the bearing of the transmitter making it. Girlie, you're the egghead, and I've always been curious about how that works. Do you have any idea?"
Lily hummed a bit before clipping the radio onto her belt while they arrived at the top. All members were scanning every direction with their weapons, "Well, the basics of radio direction finding is simple spherical geometry while radio triangulation is based on combining that with trigonometry. The earliest systems in WW2 used a physically rotating antenna -- it would spin at a known RPM, and the highest signal strength received during one full rotation could be correlated to a bearing from the receiver. Think of it like when you call for an all-around defence, you got men looking in each direction, and if one of them hears a gunshot, even if every man heard the shot, the one pointed in that direction hears it the best, understands it is coming from that quadrant and he calls it out."
She tilted her head to one side, "But these obviously have no moving parts, so they must be using multiple tiny antennas and electronics to do a similar calculation. That is much more complicated and requires you to know a little bit about the physics of how light on this part of the spectrum works. It's not looking for the highest signal but instead when a signal is at 90 degree offset of an antenna a--"
Grace held her hands up and started waving them, "Stop, stop, stop! I got the first explanation, but now I am starting to feel like I know less than when you started. So, let me just pretend they have a rotating antenna in them; that makes sense and is something I can wrap my head around!"
Lily smiled and nodded. They got to the first mostly intact building on the campus. Grace growled at the sign which declared this was the 'John C. Coolidge building', "It's just named after some guy, with no telling what's inside."
Lily clucked her tongue, "Must have been built with the donation money of some rich guy, probably who used to go to the University of Maryland. I'd say it's probably classrooms and physical lab rooms. Schools like this would usually add a suffix if it were office space like it would be the John C. Coolidge administration building or what have you."
New John piped up, "Thanks, Professor Girlie," to which Lily stuck her tongue out at him.
"Okay, we'll clear this building first. Girlie, you hold back and just watch, see how we do this, and in the next building, we'll give you a shot," Grace said.
The four of them cleared the room as well as anything she had a memory of from her time in the US Army, at least when they only had a total of four people to do it. The Army would have set a whole platoon on this building. It took over an hour to finish, even with them moving fast, and there were three pockets of feral ghouls that were put down without Lily having to do anything.
Speaking of which, the personality simulation of this Assaultron was well into the bitch range, Lily decided, giving it a side-eye again. Earlier, after the second fight where neither it nor Lily had to do anything, the robot piped up with its own comment. Pausing, Lily decided that wasn't appropriate and mentally started using feminine pronouns for the robot. Besides clearly having a feminine voice, anything this mean-girl bitchy had to be a girl. Earlier, the exchange with it went, "Query, have we switched to the Baby Protocol? The protocol for big babies who can't do anything for themselves?"
When Lily just stared at her, she gave a final derisive, digitized, "BABY," before turning to look for ghouls, which, by her body language, she clearly hoped would get by the grenadiers.
The building was full of classrooms, chemistry and physics labs, with a computer lab on almost every other floor. After clearing the last floor, they paused. Grace directed, "We should hit the computer labs first, then each team should work that floor downwards. Then, after that, wherever you want for an hour or so. Make sure your radio is set to channel six. Every time you shift floors report that. I'll do a commo check every fifteen minutes; if there is no reply, all teams will drop everything and head to the last reported position, group, up and search. The Brotherhood sometimes uses channel one, but more often, they use radios that operate on different frequency bands than these units."
Everyone nodded and selected floors. She and the Assaultron would begin on this top floor. She began systematically searching the computer lab. A handful of terminals still worked, and she took a little time to see if there was anything interesting on them. There wasn't.
She carried a small cachet of tools most of the time now, and she used them to quickly disassemble the working units, taking the motherboards and the high-voltage display symbol generators, something akin to a graphics card. The actual glass screens were not that valuable and could even be manufactured by some large settlements, like Rivet City, but some of the individual components were still mostly unreproducible by any but the Brotherhood and the Enclave. She also took the fission batteries out of every unit, even the broken ones, but that was such a quick process as they attached somewhat like laptop batteries on the back and just slid out without using any tools.
The mainframe computer that the terminals were connected to in the past wouldn't power up. Lily didn't know if it was just a lack of sufficient power or whether there was significant damage to it, but he suspected a little of both.
Humming happily to herself, she opened up the service panel. It was large, like the hood of a car and opened up like a Delorean or Tesla Model X door. Or it probably would have if it was 200 years ago. Instead, Lily ended up having to ask the Assaultron to rip it off its hinges, which she did with relish.
Lily shined her PipBoy light into the cavernous computer. These mainframes were built similarly to the "blade" style of servers in her past life. There were dozens of subordinate but full computers that slotted into the main motherboard. She diagnosed more than half as not worth her time, those she yanked out and tossed on the floor in a pile. She took out the others one at a time and examined them briefly.
Even with the Mr Handy corpse, she couldn't take all of these with her. So she settled for the most expensive parts of each, which thankfully were small. She pulled out each processor and all the RAM and core memory and set that aside in her keep pile. After she was done, she salvaged the power supplies at the bottom of the mainframe's chassis. These mainframes needed very smooth power in a lot of amps, so these power supplies were quite sophisticated, expensive and could be repurposed in a lot of different ways. When she was about to leave, the Assaultron piped up, pointing, "The stupid human baby forgot the parallel processing control unit."
Lily glared at her, "The wha---ahh.." She had been salvaging parts from each of the "blades" of the mainframe but didn't bother with the mainframe's motherboard itself. The actual mainframe's CPU wasn't that much more valuable than each of the blade processors, and it was a lot bigger pain in the ass to reach. But what the Assaultron was pointing to was a plug-in module next to the CPU. She had missed that, but honestly, she had only briefly read texts about mainframe computing since he got into this world. She glanced at the Assaultron, "Does that organize the computing cluster, then?"
The Assaultron turned away, "Yes. Unknown how many chickens or shiny beads a disgusting human TODAY would exchange with you for it as this Unit is only specialized in killing disgusting humans, not understanding their stupid tribal economics... but it was worth almost a quarter of the value of this entire machine when it was built."
Lily rolled her eyes. Was the killbot a tsun? Also, her personality seemed a bit developed. She'd mention it to Sophie and the Mechanist; maybe the Assaultron was sandbagging them. She half-climbed into the mainframe's chassis and carefully unslotted, and then pulled out the module in question. Since she was already inside the machine, she took a couple more minutes to free the mainframe processor but decided to skip the memory as that wasn't as easily removed without spending another hour at the job.
"Thanks," Lily mentioned but got no reply.
She carefully wrapped all of the delicate parts in cloth and secured them in her rucksack. After Grace did the next commo check, she replied with, "Girlie reporting, all clear." It really was her codename now.
She searched the rest of the rooms but not as thoroughly. Still, she came home with about two dozen energy cells that powered each of the lab stations in each chemistry lab. They were discharged, but it was relatively easy to recharge them and about that many fission batteries and some easily transportable and salable chemistry precursors.
She reported her descent to the next floor down and began looting that too. After a while, she heard the radio squelch, "B.J. to boss; we found a door in the basement none of us noticed during the initial sweep."
Grace's voice came back on the radio, "Roger, don't investigate yet. We'll hit that when we group back up. Any clue what it is?"
Big John got back on the radio after a moment, "There is a sign that says: 'BSL-2 rules in effect. All personnel must wear proper PPE.' Do you know what that means, boss?"
Lily perked up immediately. She started running through the last two rooms; now, she was excited. Grace got back on the radio, "PPE means Personal Protective Equipment, so maybe it's like one of these chemistry labs where they use some of the more dangerous chemicals? Professor Girlie, do you have a clue?"
Lily grabbed the radio and keyed the PTT excitedly, "BSL means Bio-Safety Level, it is a set of standards ranging, generally, from 1 to 4 and contains rules and standards about equipment for the safe handling of viruses, prions, bacteria and other infectious diseases."
There was quiet on the radio for a long time. Finally, Grace came back, "Uhh.. then maybe we WON'T look through that door," and Big John offered, "No shit, boss."
No, no! Lily definitely was going to rummage through ALL the drawers in that lab. She keyed the PTT again, "No, no! There's unlikely to be anything very dangerous there. BSL-2 is the second lowest level, and they'd only be investigating simple, relatively harmless pathogens like the common cold, or maybe not even that dangerous. I definitely want to look around down there. It might be really important to me."
Grace replied, "Uhh, I dunno, Girlie. We definitely aren't going in there, so it might be dangerous for you to go in alone. Then after that, what if you were infected with something and then brought it back to us?"
Lily went to click the PTT to say that she was likely immune to any such viruses but then realized that saying such a thing in the clear unencrypted in D.C. might be a poor idea. Instead, she just said, "I'm done with the top two floors anyway, so I'm headed down there. I'll tell you in person. Girlie, out."
She skipped with excitement down the stairs. She met up with Big John and Tangent in the basement and waved at them.
After about twenty minutes, Grace and New John showed up; Lily supposed that they finished up their own looting before coming down. Grace glanced at her before saying, "So, what did you not want to say on the radio? If you can convince me it is more or less safe, we'll go clear the dormitory next door while you can search this BSL lab."
Lily grinned, "Well. I do not really want to talk about why and, in fact, will refuse to speak further about the specifics, but I am immune to most pathogens. Maybe not things like the New Plague or weaponized hantavirus or ebola, but even baseline versions of those pathogens would require a BSL-4 facility, of which there probably is only one or two in D.C." Actually, Lily was pretty confident about her ability to fight off most mundane bio-weapons, so long as she wasn't suffused entirely with virions.
Grace shook her head, "You know, you're making me more and more curious about your background and not in a good way. But okay, I will assume you are telling the truth. And that there isn't anything more dangerous than the common cold in there, but what about defences? Roof turrets, security bots, etcetera?"
Lily waved her hand dismissively, "No way! First, the BSL standards at all levels preclude anything like that -- the security is all supposed to be at the access control points, not inside the lab where a bullet or laser beam could break vials or explosions could aerosolize particles! Maybe if this was Fort Maryland and it was a DoD lab, they would do that shit anyway, but there is just no way."
Lily paused for a moment, "There might, probably, are ghouls, though. But that's why I 'ave Matilda here." She hiked a thumb at the Assaultron.
Grace's lips were twitching upwards, "Matilda?"
Lily nodded, "When she cuts loose, you'll understand. She goes waltzing around; it is not, how you say, the rock and roll step."
The Assaultron radiated approval for the potential to cut loose. Its claws spinning in what might be excitement, "Temporary Designation: Matilda. Accepted. Ready to engage dance of death protocols."
After a moment, Grace nodded, "Okay, you've convinced me the risk is minimal. First, let's go over all we've looted here and pack it up."
They each brought out their loot and spread it around the floor. There were a lot of energy cells, fission batteries, and generalized electronic scrap. Surprisingly, in Grace's pile, there were three laser rifles and what looked like a busted plasma rifle in two pieces.
Grace noticed her surprised expression, "Apparently, after the war, a small group of soldiers, deserters probably, holed up in that ROTC office we saw on the second floor. Probably not for too long, as they looked to have died there. Radiation, maybe?" The Amazon shrugged. "I wish the plasma rifle worked; that is something we might not even sell. We might be able to get it repaired at Rivet City or Megaton."
Lily clucked her tongue, inspecting it. "The damage to the stock is just cosmetic. But the accelerating coils on the plasma accelerator..." Lily shook her head, "They definitely need to be fixed. But all the superconducting wire is, more or less, still there. I'm pretty sure I can fix it, but perhaps test-fire it with a string from ten meters away after I am done?"
Grace grinned, "That would be great if you could, and yeah, that sounds prudent. What are all these chips?"
Lily grinned, "The processors and memory from the mainframe in the top floor computer lab."
Grace slapped her head theatrically with the flat of her palm, "It looks like us and BJ's team just grabbed the power supplies out of there. Perhaps you should hit each lab on our floors after you get done down here? We'll keep the comm check going while we work the dorms."
Lily nodded, "Oui, oui. But I do not know if the radio will reach the next building from inside the lab; if it is built properly, then there will be a fair amount of isolation built into it. But when I step out, I'll re-establish comms. Is that okay?"
Grace pursed her lips again before nodding, "Yes. We'll leave our haul from here down here in the basement but take the Mister Handy next door. Sound good?"
Lily nodded, and each of them carefully repacked all of the loot. Grace gave a simple, "Don't die, girlie!" before they quick timed it up the stairs.
Lily rubbed her hands together. She doubted she would find much that was very interesting, like a strain of F.E.V., but she would likely find things that were at least useful, even if they were common.
The door to the lab wasn't like Vault-Tec doors, but it did have a manual dogging that Lily had to undog before she could open the door. When she did, she glanced over at the Assaultron, "Matilda, sweep and clear. No killing any non-hostile sapient, though. If there are any bots, don't trash them unless they attack. And be VERY careful not to destroy any other equipment in here. If you encounter any automated turrets or bots armed with heavy anti-mat weapons systems, retreat back to the entrance. Acknowledge." Lily didn't EXPECT any still lucid ghouls in here, but it was a possibility.
The Assaultron grinned somehow, despite not having a face that had any ability to actually grin, and said, with her tone dripping pleased malice, "Sweep and clear!"
The Assaultron started moving ahead of her, but then, realizing that her orders were perhaps not specific enough, Lily added, "No MAIMING non-hostile sapients, either!"
The Assaultron's shoulders drooped momentarily before she continued into the unknown lab. Lily followed her slowly, her carbine ready.
As she watched the Assaultron step into the next room, she heard the groanings of ghouls followed by the bot vocalizing, "Hostiles detected in the AO. Beginning elimination sub-routines!"
Well, at least she is having fun, Lily thought. She started examining the first couple of rooms. There was some useful loot here already. Nothing that she really was looking for, but the PPE inside the donning and doffing room would be useful and eminently salable. Despite this being only a BSL-2 lab, they had full-body suits and full positive pressure respirators in a closet. Perhaps as emergency equipment for if there was a break in their lab containment or protocols?
Before she could even enter the first room of the lab proper, Matilda returned, "Reporting, four ghouls eliminated with extreme prejudice, the AO is clear."
Lily squinted at her, "Did you try to at least communicate with them first?"
The Assaultron's speakers suddenly played back a zombie-like groan of "Raaahhhhhh," followed by her robot voice dripping sarcasm, "Like that?"
"Just.... never mind," Lily said, "Go guard the entrance from the basement side. I'm going to be thorough here."
Matilda did a passable salute with one claw before turning and heading out through the entrance, but Lily could just barely hear most of a low-volume mutter the robot was making to herself in the next room, which ended with, "... sorry you didn't get a chance to surrender to them... stupid frogs."
Lily bristled as she thought angrily, Hey, first of all, I am only PRETENDING to be French. Also, dude, frog is really not the preferred nomenclature. Franco-American, please.
Whatever. She pulled out her scanner from her bag and booted it up. First, she opened up her medichine interface and checked the log. There was no sign of a detected viral infection that they destroyed. She waved it around the air and did not find any virons there either. She'd repeat this for each room she entered, just in case.
She was mainly here for specialized lab equipment that would be difficult or annoying to make. For example, she was disassembling an autoclave right now. She could take its most important pieces back with her.
However, she hit the jackpot. In both biosafety cabinets, she discovered still operable, running cryogenic systems. The first was almost entirely full of the synthetic guide RNA and complex nuclease used for primitive gene editing.
Did this lab have a small nuclear reactor providing electricity? Honestly, Lily was always curious about power sources whenever she saw operating electrical devices in the wastelands, but these cryogenic freezers used significant power.
She supposed she didn't really need to know, but she would mention it to Grace.
Opening the second freezer, she was pleased it contained specimens. Useless, useless, useless. She went down the list of stored pathogens. Most were bacteria or prions that she didn't have much use for. Of the few viruses, none were easily edited to become a good vector for genetic modifications... except...
She smiled. HIV, although she didn't recognize the precise designation but HIV was always a useful retrovirus. And lastly, a similarly unknown coronavirus. It appeared like the viral designations she was familiar with have no history here.
She took the four vials of HIV and coronavirus out of the second freezer and began scanning them to identify their specific strain. There was no match to the HIV in her scanner's databases, but it was very similar to HIV-2. As for the coronavirus, it was identical to what Lily would call one of the strains of the common cold.
She was amazed that a respiratory virus like coronavirus was being stored in a BSL-2 lab at all, even if it was just the common cold.
She wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, and she supposed, considering the usual outbreaks in viral research labs in the Fallout universe, potential coronavirus recombination would be hardly noticed in a world of F.E.V. and New Plague.
She slid the viruses into the first freezer and then carefully disconnected it and brought it out of the cabinet. She clucked her tongue. This called for some practical electrical engineering.
She half disassembled the fridge, removing any unnecessary bits to cut down on the weight. She could have tossed the freezer's transformer rectifier unit as she planned on powering this for the trek back to town with energy cells, which provided DC power, but she figured she would need that when she got back, so she only bypassed it.
It took almost an hour to get the now mobile cryogenic system operational. Lily looked longingly at the second freezer -- freezers that could keep things cold enough that they could be called cryogenic were quite valuable. But there was no way the group could cart back both of them. Even with this one, she'd probably have to pay some of her share for it.
She heard a shout from the entrance, "HEEEY Girlie! There were some raiders in the dorms, and Big John was hurt. Are you fucking done in there?"
Blinking, she made sure the freezer was stable for now, slid her scanner back into her bag and rushed out.
They all looked a bit injured, and Matilda the Assaultron glared daggers at her, "We MISSED it!"
Then Big John caught Lily's attention by waving at her, except he was waving his severed right hand with his good one, "Hey, we came over because we thought you could use a hand!"
A groan involuntarily escaped Lily's lips.
"However, since we got the hover bot to carry most everything else, we can also get some personal items that we can take back ourselves, but only if they don't fall into the previous categories. If they do, then you can still keep them, but you have to buy them from the venture, at a discount, either with caps right away or with portions of your share," Grace continued, then her voice got serious, "So, everything we cart off has to be known to all the rest of us, just to keep everybody fair."
Everyone nodded, but Lily tilted her head to the side. Grace seemed to be implying that they would be doing some searching not as a group, "We are going to split up?" Her voice made it clear what she thought about that idea.
Grace made the universal hand-waffling motion, "Yes, and no. We will work building by building; we will completely clear it first quickly, and then when we've agreed the danger is minimal, we'll generally use the buddy system and split up to gather things faster in separate areas. You'll probably be by yourself since you have Little Miss Murderbot with you." The Assaultron seemed to approve of this designation, if her body language was any guide. Grace dug out three things from her pack and handed one of them to Lily, then the next to Big John.
Lily glanced down at it; it was hand-held radio. Although it seemed bigger than it needed to be, it was about the size of one of those old Motorola brick-style phones. It was way better than Vietnam-era military radios, but the main thing keeping those big was the shitty batteries of that era. Grace warned each of them, "I'd say be careful with these, but they're actually strong enough to withstand a bomb blast and still work -- I know because we found them in a blown up pre-war Vertibird. So, what I really mean is don't fucking lose them. This kind of tech is almost impossible to find these days. Even with all that we're going to take if we lose one of these, we're at a net loss this trip." She glanced straight at Lily, "You know what this is? Do you need help figuring it out?"
Lily shook her head, "Hand-held radio." She inspected the device. Nothing designed to work for the average soldier would be insanely complicated. She easily found the on/off, volume, push-to-talk, squelch and frequency selection dials. "Seems pretty straightforward, but what is this?" Lily indicated a small circular gauge that looked like a clock on the front of the device, next to the speaker grill, except it just had a minute hand.
Grace stared at her hard for what seemed like a long time, which caused Lily to feel a bit self-conscious. Then Lily realized that maybe most people have never seen a hand-held radio in the grimdark future of Fallout. Even most radios in the game looked more like ham-radio sets. Still, Grace didn't mention it but smiled after a moment, "Ah, that's the coolest thing about these. It has an automatic direction finder built-in. So while the radio is receiving a broadcast, that needle will point to the bearing of the transmitter making it. Girlie, you're the egghead, and I've always been curious about how that works. Do you have any idea?"
Lily hummed a bit before clipping the radio onto her belt while they arrived at the top. All members were scanning every direction with their weapons, "Well, the basics of radio direction finding is simple spherical geometry while radio triangulation is based on combining that with trigonometry. The earliest systems in WW2 used a physically rotating antenna -- it would spin at a known RPM, and the highest signal strength received during one full rotation could be correlated to a bearing from the receiver. Think of it like when you call for an all-around defence, you got men looking in each direction, and if one of them hears a gunshot, even if every man heard the shot, the one pointed in that direction hears it the best, understands it is coming from that quadrant and he calls it out."
She tilted her head to one side, "But these obviously have no moving parts, so they must be using multiple tiny antennas and electronics to do a similar calculation. That is much more complicated and requires you to know a little bit about the physics of how light on this part of the spectrum works. It's not looking for the highest signal but instead when a signal is at 90 degree offset of an antenna a--"
Grace held her hands up and started waving them, "Stop, stop, stop! I got the first explanation, but now I am starting to feel like I know less than when you started. So, let me just pretend they have a rotating antenna in them; that makes sense and is something I can wrap my head around!"
Lily smiled and nodded. They got to the first mostly intact building on the campus. Grace growled at the sign which declared this was the 'John C. Coolidge building', "It's just named after some guy, with no telling what's inside."
Lily clucked her tongue, "Must have been built with the donation money of some rich guy, probably who used to go to the University of Maryland. I'd say it's probably classrooms and physical lab rooms. Schools like this would usually add a suffix if it were office space like it would be the John C. Coolidge administration building or what have you."
New John piped up, "Thanks, Professor Girlie," to which Lily stuck her tongue out at him.
"Okay, we'll clear this building first. Girlie, you hold back and just watch, see how we do this, and in the next building, we'll give you a shot," Grace said.
The four of them cleared the room as well as anything she had a memory of from her time in the US Army, at least when they only had a total of four people to do it. The Army would have set a whole platoon on this building. It took over an hour to finish, even with them moving fast, and there were three pockets of feral ghouls that were put down without Lily having to do anything.
Speaking of which, the personality simulation of this Assaultron was well into the bitch range, Lily decided, giving it a side-eye again. Earlier, after the second fight where neither it nor Lily had to do anything, the robot piped up with its own comment. Pausing, Lily decided that wasn't appropriate and mentally started using feminine pronouns for the robot. Besides clearly having a feminine voice, anything this mean-girl bitchy had to be a girl. Earlier, the exchange with it went, "Query, have we switched to the Baby Protocol? The protocol for big babies who can't do anything for themselves?"
When Lily just stared at her, she gave a final derisive, digitized, "BABY," before turning to look for ghouls, which, by her body language, she clearly hoped would get by the grenadiers.
The building was full of classrooms, chemistry and physics labs, with a computer lab on almost every other floor. After clearing the last floor, they paused. Grace directed, "We should hit the computer labs first, then each team should work that floor downwards. Then, after that, wherever you want for an hour or so. Make sure your radio is set to channel six. Every time you shift floors report that. I'll do a commo check every fifteen minutes; if there is no reply, all teams will drop everything and head to the last reported position, group, up and search. The Brotherhood sometimes uses channel one, but more often, they use radios that operate on different frequency bands than these units."
Everyone nodded and selected floors. She and the Assaultron would begin on this top floor. She began systematically searching the computer lab. A handful of terminals still worked, and she took a little time to see if there was anything interesting on them. There wasn't.
She carried a small cachet of tools most of the time now, and she used them to quickly disassemble the working units, taking the motherboards and the high-voltage display symbol generators, something akin to a graphics card. The actual glass screens were not that valuable and could even be manufactured by some large settlements, like Rivet City, but some of the individual components were still mostly unreproducible by any but the Brotherhood and the Enclave. She also took the fission batteries out of every unit, even the broken ones, but that was such a quick process as they attached somewhat like laptop batteries on the back and just slid out without using any tools.
The mainframe computer that the terminals were connected to in the past wouldn't power up. Lily didn't know if it was just a lack of sufficient power or whether there was significant damage to it, but he suspected a little of both.
Humming happily to herself, she opened up the service panel. It was large, like the hood of a car and opened up like a Delorean or Tesla Model X door. Or it probably would have if it was 200 years ago. Instead, Lily ended up having to ask the Assaultron to rip it off its hinges, which she did with relish.
Lily shined her PipBoy light into the cavernous computer. These mainframes were built similarly to the "blade" style of servers in her past life. There were dozens of subordinate but full computers that slotted into the main motherboard. She diagnosed more than half as not worth her time, those she yanked out and tossed on the floor in a pile. She took out the others one at a time and examined them briefly.
Even with the Mr Handy corpse, she couldn't take all of these with her. So she settled for the most expensive parts of each, which thankfully were small. She pulled out each processor and all the RAM and core memory and set that aside in her keep pile. After she was done, she salvaged the power supplies at the bottom of the mainframe's chassis. These mainframes needed very smooth power in a lot of amps, so these power supplies were quite sophisticated, expensive and could be repurposed in a lot of different ways. When she was about to leave, the Assaultron piped up, pointing, "The stupid human baby forgot the parallel processing control unit."
Lily glared at her, "The wha---ahh.." She had been salvaging parts from each of the "blades" of the mainframe but didn't bother with the mainframe's motherboard itself. The actual mainframe's CPU wasn't that much more valuable than each of the blade processors, and it was a lot bigger pain in the ass to reach. But what the Assaultron was pointing to was a plug-in module next to the CPU. She had missed that, but honestly, she had only briefly read texts about mainframe computing since he got into this world. She glanced at the Assaultron, "Does that organize the computing cluster, then?"
The Assaultron turned away, "Yes. Unknown how many chickens or shiny beads a disgusting human TODAY would exchange with you for it as this Unit is only specialized in killing disgusting humans, not understanding their stupid tribal economics... but it was worth almost a quarter of the value of this entire machine when it was built."
Lily rolled her eyes. Was the killbot a tsun? Also, her personality seemed a bit developed. She'd mention it to Sophie and the Mechanist; maybe the Assaultron was sandbagging them. She half-climbed into the mainframe's chassis and carefully unslotted, and then pulled out the module in question. Since she was already inside the machine, she took a couple more minutes to free the mainframe processor but decided to skip the memory as that wasn't as easily removed without spending another hour at the job.
"Thanks," Lily mentioned but got no reply.
She carefully wrapped all of the delicate parts in cloth and secured them in her rucksack. After Grace did the next commo check, she replied with, "Girlie reporting, all clear." It really was her codename now.
She searched the rest of the rooms but not as thoroughly. Still, she came home with about two dozen energy cells that powered each of the lab stations in each chemistry lab. They were discharged, but it was relatively easy to recharge them and about that many fission batteries and some easily transportable and salable chemistry precursors.
She reported her descent to the next floor down and began looting that too. After a while, she heard the radio squelch, "B.J. to boss; we found a door in the basement none of us noticed during the initial sweep."
Grace's voice came back on the radio, "Roger, don't investigate yet. We'll hit that when we group back up. Any clue what it is?"
Big John got back on the radio after a moment, "There is a sign that says: 'BSL-2 rules in effect. All personnel must wear proper PPE.' Do you know what that means, boss?"
Lily perked up immediately. She started running through the last two rooms; now, she was excited. Grace got back on the radio, "PPE means Personal Protective Equipment, so maybe it's like one of these chemistry labs where they use some of the more dangerous chemicals? Professor Girlie, do you have a clue?"
Lily grabbed the radio and keyed the PTT excitedly, "BSL means Bio-Safety Level, it is a set of standards ranging, generally, from 1 to 4 and contains rules and standards about equipment for the safe handling of viruses, prions, bacteria and other infectious diseases."
There was quiet on the radio for a long time. Finally, Grace came back, "Uhh.. then maybe we WON'T look through that door," and Big John offered, "No shit, boss."
No, no! Lily definitely was going to rummage through ALL the drawers in that lab. She keyed the PTT again, "No, no! There's unlikely to be anything very dangerous there. BSL-2 is the second lowest level, and they'd only be investigating simple, relatively harmless pathogens like the common cold, or maybe not even that dangerous. I definitely want to look around down there. It might be really important to me."
Grace replied, "Uhh, I dunno, Girlie. We definitely aren't going in there, so it might be dangerous for you to go in alone. Then after that, what if you were infected with something and then brought it back to us?"
Lily went to click the PTT to say that she was likely immune to any such viruses but then realized that saying such a thing in the clear unencrypted in D.C. might be a poor idea. Instead, she just said, "I'm done with the top two floors anyway, so I'm headed down there. I'll tell you in person. Girlie, out."
She skipped with excitement down the stairs. She met up with Big John and Tangent in the basement and waved at them.
After about twenty minutes, Grace and New John showed up; Lily supposed that they finished up their own looting before coming down. Grace glanced at her before saying, "So, what did you not want to say on the radio? If you can convince me it is more or less safe, we'll go clear the dormitory next door while you can search this BSL lab."
Lily grinned, "Well. I do not really want to talk about why and, in fact, will refuse to speak further about the specifics, but I am immune to most pathogens. Maybe not things like the New Plague or weaponized hantavirus or ebola, but even baseline versions of those pathogens would require a BSL-4 facility, of which there probably is only one or two in D.C." Actually, Lily was pretty confident about her ability to fight off most mundane bio-weapons, so long as she wasn't suffused entirely with virions.
Grace shook her head, "You know, you're making me more and more curious about your background and not in a good way. But okay, I will assume you are telling the truth. And that there isn't anything more dangerous than the common cold in there, but what about defences? Roof turrets, security bots, etcetera?"
Lily waved her hand dismissively, "No way! First, the BSL standards at all levels preclude anything like that -- the security is all supposed to be at the access control points, not inside the lab where a bullet or laser beam could break vials or explosions could aerosolize particles! Maybe if this was Fort Maryland and it was a DoD lab, they would do that shit anyway, but there is just no way."
Lily paused for a moment, "There might, probably, are ghouls, though. But that's why I 'ave Matilda here." She hiked a thumb at the Assaultron.
Grace's lips were twitching upwards, "Matilda?"
Lily nodded, "When she cuts loose, you'll understand. She goes waltzing around; it is not, how you say, the rock and roll step."
The Assaultron radiated approval for the potential to cut loose. Its claws spinning in what might be excitement, "Temporary Designation: Matilda. Accepted. Ready to engage dance of death protocols."
After a moment, Grace nodded, "Okay, you've convinced me the risk is minimal. First, let's go over all we've looted here and pack it up."
They each brought out their loot and spread it around the floor. There were a lot of energy cells, fission batteries, and generalized electronic scrap. Surprisingly, in Grace's pile, there were three laser rifles and what looked like a busted plasma rifle in two pieces.
Grace noticed her surprised expression, "Apparently, after the war, a small group of soldiers, deserters probably, holed up in that ROTC office we saw on the second floor. Probably not for too long, as they looked to have died there. Radiation, maybe?" The Amazon shrugged. "I wish the plasma rifle worked; that is something we might not even sell. We might be able to get it repaired at Rivet City or Megaton."
Lily clucked her tongue, inspecting it. "The damage to the stock is just cosmetic. But the accelerating coils on the plasma accelerator..." Lily shook her head, "They definitely need to be fixed. But all the superconducting wire is, more or less, still there. I'm pretty sure I can fix it, but perhaps test-fire it with a string from ten meters away after I am done?"
Grace grinned, "That would be great if you could, and yeah, that sounds prudent. What are all these chips?"
Lily grinned, "The processors and memory from the mainframe in the top floor computer lab."
Grace slapped her head theatrically with the flat of her palm, "It looks like us and BJ's team just grabbed the power supplies out of there. Perhaps you should hit each lab on our floors after you get done down here? We'll keep the comm check going while we work the dorms."
Lily nodded, "Oui, oui. But I do not know if the radio will reach the next building from inside the lab; if it is built properly, then there will be a fair amount of isolation built into it. But when I step out, I'll re-establish comms. Is that okay?"
Grace pursed her lips again before nodding, "Yes. We'll leave our haul from here down here in the basement but take the Mister Handy next door. Sound good?"
Lily nodded, and each of them carefully repacked all of the loot. Grace gave a simple, "Don't die, girlie!" before they quick timed it up the stairs.
Lily rubbed her hands together. She doubted she would find much that was very interesting, like a strain of F.E.V., but she would likely find things that were at least useful, even if they were common.
The door to the lab wasn't like Vault-Tec doors, but it did have a manual dogging that Lily had to undog before she could open the door. When she did, she glanced over at the Assaultron, "Matilda, sweep and clear. No killing any non-hostile sapient, though. If there are any bots, don't trash them unless they attack. And be VERY careful not to destroy any other equipment in here. If you encounter any automated turrets or bots armed with heavy anti-mat weapons systems, retreat back to the entrance. Acknowledge." Lily didn't EXPECT any still lucid ghouls in here, but it was a possibility.
The Assaultron grinned somehow, despite not having a face that had any ability to actually grin, and said, with her tone dripping pleased malice, "Sweep and clear!"
The Assaultron started moving ahead of her, but then, realizing that her orders were perhaps not specific enough, Lily added, "No MAIMING non-hostile sapients, either!"
The Assaultron's shoulders drooped momentarily before she continued into the unknown lab. Lily followed her slowly, her carbine ready.
As she watched the Assaultron step into the next room, she heard the groanings of ghouls followed by the bot vocalizing, "Hostiles detected in the AO. Beginning elimination sub-routines!"
Well, at least she is having fun, Lily thought. She started examining the first couple of rooms. There was some useful loot here already. Nothing that she really was looking for, but the PPE inside the donning and doffing room would be useful and eminently salable. Despite this being only a BSL-2 lab, they had full-body suits and full positive pressure respirators in a closet. Perhaps as emergency equipment for if there was a break in their lab containment or protocols?
Before she could even enter the first room of the lab proper, Matilda returned, "Reporting, four ghouls eliminated with extreme prejudice, the AO is clear."
Lily squinted at her, "Did you try to at least communicate with them first?"
The Assaultron's speakers suddenly played back a zombie-like groan of "Raaahhhhhh," followed by her robot voice dripping sarcasm, "Like that?"
"Just.... never mind," Lily said, "Go guard the entrance from the basement side. I'm going to be thorough here."
Matilda did a passable salute with one claw before turning and heading out through the entrance, but Lily could just barely hear most of a low-volume mutter the robot was making to herself in the next room, which ended with, "... sorry you didn't get a chance to surrender to them... stupid frogs."
Lily bristled as she thought angrily, Hey, first of all, I am only PRETENDING to be French. Also, dude, frog is really not the preferred nomenclature. Franco-American, please.
Whatever. She pulled out her scanner from her bag and booted it up. First, she opened up her medichine interface and checked the log. There was no sign of a detected viral infection that they destroyed. She waved it around the air and did not find any virons there either. She'd repeat this for each room she entered, just in case.
She was mainly here for specialized lab equipment that would be difficult or annoying to make. For example, she was disassembling an autoclave right now. She could take its most important pieces back with her.
However, she hit the jackpot. In both biosafety cabinets, she discovered still operable, running cryogenic systems. The first was almost entirely full of the synthetic guide RNA and complex nuclease used for primitive gene editing.
Did this lab have a small nuclear reactor providing electricity? Honestly, Lily was always curious about power sources whenever she saw operating electrical devices in the wastelands, but these cryogenic freezers used significant power.
She supposed she didn't really need to know, but she would mention it to Grace.
Opening the second freezer, she was pleased it contained specimens. Useless, useless, useless. She went down the list of stored pathogens. Most were bacteria or prions that she didn't have much use for. Of the few viruses, none were easily edited to become a good vector for genetic modifications... except...
She smiled. HIV, although she didn't recognize the precise designation but HIV was always a useful retrovirus. And lastly, a similarly unknown coronavirus. It appeared like the viral designations she was familiar with have no history here.
She took the four vials of HIV and coronavirus out of the second freezer and began scanning them to identify their specific strain. There was no match to the HIV in her scanner's databases, but it was very similar to HIV-2. As for the coronavirus, it was identical to what Lily would call one of the strains of the common cold.
She was amazed that a respiratory virus like coronavirus was being stored in a BSL-2 lab at all, even if it was just the common cold.
She wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, and she supposed, considering the usual outbreaks in viral research labs in the Fallout universe, potential coronavirus recombination would be hardly noticed in a world of F.E.V. and New Plague.
She slid the viruses into the first freezer and then carefully disconnected it and brought it out of the cabinet. She clucked her tongue. This called for some practical electrical engineering.
She half disassembled the fridge, removing any unnecessary bits to cut down on the weight. She could have tossed the freezer's transformer rectifier unit as she planned on powering this for the trek back to town with energy cells, which provided DC power, but she figured she would need that when she got back, so she only bypassed it.
It took almost an hour to get the now mobile cryogenic system operational. Lily looked longingly at the second freezer -- freezers that could keep things cold enough that they could be called cryogenic were quite valuable. But there was no way the group could cart back both of them. Even with this one, she'd probably have to pay some of her share for it.
She heard a shout from the entrance, "HEEEY Girlie! There were some raiders in the dorms, and Big John was hurt. Are you fucking done in there?"
Blinking, she made sure the freezer was stable for now, slid her scanner back into her bag and rushed out.
They all looked a bit injured, and Matilda the Assaultron glared daggers at her, "We MISSED it!"
Then Big John caught Lily's attention by waving at her, except he was waving his severed right hand with his good one, "Hey, we came over because we thought you could use a hand!"
A groan involuntarily escaped Lily's lips.
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johnwedd
Above Average man
- Location
- usa
To bad the genetic tool box she found is so primitive, can't suddenly create the super human serum that (had the lab she is used to) she could whip up on her lunch break.
No, if she was gonna make a biological augmentation it would be simple and practical . Like a retro virus that makes the liver throw off enzymes that absorb the free ions associated with radiation and then dumps them in the waste system of the lower intestinal tract or kidneys. This would allow people to possibly survive radiation poisoning before becoming a walking tumor.
Possibly, maybe a 20% resistance tops. And that would probably be the most drastic genetic shift she could do without it blowing up. Otherwise, she will probably just flip a few genetic switches in order to stop chronic issues from flailing up.
Crap, I rambled again.
No, if she was gonna make a biological augmentation it would be simple and practical . Like a retro virus that makes the liver throw off enzymes that absorb the free ions associated with radiation and then dumps them in the waste system of the lower intestinal tract or kidneys. This would allow people to possibly survive radiation poisoning before becoming a walking tumor.
Possibly, maybe a 20% resistance tops. And that would probably be the most drastic genetic shift she could do without it blowing up. Otherwise, she will probably just flip a few genetic switches in order to stop chronic issues from flailing up.
Crap, I rambled again.
