At The Precipice Of Something New

Something Shocking

Sanctuary Hills
October the 25th, 2287
9:37

"You're serious? You were born before the War?"

Eyeing the four men and two women sat across from her, Nora Jacqueline Norwich nodded, rubbing at her eyes and hoping to stop the tiredness finally gnawing at her. Doing her best to focus, she tried to go through their names again in her mind as question after question seemed to be asked of her. Their leaders...Preston Garvey and Derek Branson. Two men aligned in purpose but almost opposite in appearance; Garvey, a warm dark skinned man of about thirty with hints of muscle beneath the clothes in which he was dressed closer to that of the eighteenth century than the twenty first she had last known from his boots to his hat and the musket he carried; Branson, a pale skinned man of almost certainly Irish extraction and about fifty with greying dark brown hair and dressed in weathered armour with a thick, long sleeved shirt and equally thick well worn jeans and combat boots beneath the armour that covered his arms, chest, thighs, and calves. The weaponsmith...Sturges Presley; a tall man though a little shorter than Derek Branson, by far the tallest of the men in the group, and about fifteen to twenty years later younger than Branson who in contrast by physical appearance and disregarding the clothes under his heavy work overalls resembled Elvis Presley so closely that the surname felt to be not a coincidence. The broken family...Marcy and Jun Long; Marcy a tanned woman of likely her late twenties and in somewhat tattered clothes, shivering slightly under a blanket she had wrapped around herself, and Jun, her husband, a somewhat underweight Korean-American man of the same age as her and dressed in a shirt, pants, and jacket a little less tattered than hers. And then there was the...psychic. The psychic...Mama Murphy; an elderly woman who could not seem to stop rummaging through her oversized bag and with fair but still flushed skin, the walk from Concord – where all of them had been when Derek had rescued them from a thinning group of...raiders, as they had been called, and where Nora had, though she still could not quite say why, run to instead of home – to Sanctuary having put stress on her body she seemed unkeen to admit.

Nora sighed. At least I haven't forgotten how to use a gun, not that I ever expected to need to like this, against other people. Even inside and away from the cold and rain, things felt defeated. We're lucky. Lucky to be alive. Lucky...Derek...lucky he had been coming to meet up with them with more supplies. The feeling of luck and relief, however, came and went. It was a fleeting, temporary feeling. Two days. It had only been two days. Two days and two hundred and ten years. She pushed the thought away. It was too much. Just the thought of everything was too much to bear, too much to bear all at once. The chill of the autumn air was seeping in through one of the partially open windows and biting at nape of her neck when it floated through her dark hair where it fell down to just past her shoulders. She tightened her jacket, a weather beaten red leather one, around herself. The only damn good thing left in the Vault. Our clothes, at least, the ones we all had in our suitcases. 'The Go Bag.' If the worst were to come, at least we'd have clothes, some necessities, and...a few other things for when it'd be safe to leave the Vault. Her hands tightened around her knees again, her fingernails digging into the denim of her jeans as she tried to focus, gather her words. Her chest started to hurt again in her breasts, sore and tender. She tried not to think about why.

The world as she had known it her entire life was gone. And so was her infant son. And so was her husband. And so were everyone else they had ever known.

"She's a good soul," Mama Murphy said, reaching across the table to reassuringly pat the young woman's hands with her own frail, flushed, and creped ones when the young woman's hands moved from her knees to the tabletop, clenched tight enough together for her knuckles to start blanching against her own light but still slightly blush flushed skin. "A good soul facing unbelievable tragedy," She hummed slightly as she spoke. "If it's not too much to ask, what was your life like before the War?"