At The Precipice Of Something New

Something Promising

Vault 114
November the 14th, 2287
23:23

In his line of work, everyone knew the dangers of taking on any case of suspected crime, disappearance, or known crimes, with or without known suspects, and disappearances; a fact he knew as well to be true for when a disappearance concerned not that of material things but missing person's cases in the Commonwealth, and most especially missing person's cases out of Diamond City.

What Nick Valentine had not known was he would himself become a missing person.

Vault 114. It was never going to be a particularly pleasant place, not with the people he knew would be there, but he had not expected it to be something of a living hell. He had not expected, either, to find the woman he had been sent to find had left of her own accord. Shit, Darla, how many times have you caused your parents to have to send people after you? First the 'Pillars Of The Community' nonsense, then Covenant, and, now, this? Finding you on your way home from Covenant was the only good thing about that. Those people seemed unsettled by me. But this? Taking up with a meat head like Skinny? You have got to be kidding me... He sighed, taking off his patched up fedora and dropping it on top of one of the tables stuck in the room he had been locked up in. The climate control in his makeshift holding cell was spotty, too, something he had come to notice more and more the longer he had been kept in it. Though his largely metal construction had not been designed to include sweat glands, his loosened tie around his white polo shirt and his tan trench coat, patched up the same as his fedora, being left on a chair reminded him that he was growing to hate the heat permeating the room more than the cold he was sure was setting in above ground and outside the Vault. The room was larger than he had expected it to be but had grown to be little more than a slightly nicer prison. At least, compared to the prison in Diamond City. Wonder if they've got the young woman who writes the paper still locked up in there. She's a good one, Piper, and she doesn't deserve to be constantly in and out of prison. He sighed again, and took a look around the room. The Vault 114 Overseer's Office. If Vault-Tec had gone and had their way of it in the end, the Vault would be filled with either wealthy or formerly wealthy people. It wasn't entirely clear, not from what he had been able to find in the room.

Vault-Tec and the Vaults were, themselves, a rabbit hole he had begun down at more than one time over the past three decades alone. Being locked in the Overseer's Office of a Vault would have, at one point, been something of a dream. This, however, was far from any good or even mildly intriguing dream.

"You going to let me out of here, at some point, Dino?" Nick finally said, caught somewhere between boredom and annoyance. "Or are you just going to leave me in here until Skinny gets tired of this damn charade?"

"Skinny knows what he's doing," Dino said, kicking against the magnetically locked door with one of his beefy feet. "This excite you, Valentine? Some sounds of metal getting beat?"

"You talking about me?" Nick scoffed, hoisting himself up to sit atop the Overseer's desk. "I'm not just metal, Dino," He said, losing all of the sarcasm in his voice. "I'm a synth. Synthetic man. All the parts, minus a few red blood cells. How many chems are you on? Or is Skinny still hoarding chems for himself?"

"If you mean you got an idea of where Marowski's chem lab is, then you'll probably be able to get out of here if you cough that up," Dino replied, lighting up a cigarette from the pack in the breast pocket of his patchy suit jacket. "Unless you've been lying all this time and are just waiting for the Institute to come get you."

"The Institute have no interest in me, I think we'd know by now if they had wanted me," Nick told him. "If they wanted something to do with me, they would have come and found me sometime sooner after they wiped my damned brain somewhere around a century ago. Make of that what you will, Dino, but I'm far from an Institute priority, if that's what you're thinking."