At The Precipice Of Something New

Something Left

Diamond City
June the 4th, 2288
12:21

"Oh, what fresh hell is this?"

For Dr. Lorainne Jennifer Scara, very little was more aggravating than people suddenly and loudly entering her office. To see not one but five people and a dog be the ones to burst in uninvited was close to being a criminal offence. She cut herself short, beginning to tell them off, however, when she saw what they were carrying.

Almost speechless, she pushed through them to start down the stairs, all but yelling at everyone who was not in a lab coat to leave the Science! Centre until further notice. Uncomfortably waiting at the top of the stairs, Nick, Nora, Cait, Piper, and Ellie kept exchanging nervous glances, punctuated every so often by Dogmeat affectionately rubbing his head against one of their legs. All but throwing her hands up in exasperation, Scara waved them down and ordered them to put what they had been carrying down on the large table in the middle of the room, pushing aside the notebooks, pens, pencils, calculators, and whatever else the others had left behind in their rush out of the building. Tired just from looking at the things, Scara briefly closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose, before, finally, calling her wife over to take a look. In a much more cheerful mood than her wife, Dr. Amelia Alexis Duff simply set down her notes, told the teenage boy with dark curly hair to continue taking observations for her, and came over. When she opened one of the larger containers they had set on the table, she grimaced, removing what seemed to be a human arm, and, then, torso, raising an eyebrow when she looked at Cait, Nora, and Nick in particular.

"I'm going to go ahead and assume you three brought us pieces of a body and not the whole body for a reason, but I'm very unclear as to what that reason is."

"This is...or, more accurately, was Kellogg," Nick explained. "Turned out he was, in fact, the one who kidnapped Nora's son...and killed her husband."

"That doesn't answer the question," Duff sent him a pointed look. "Why did you bring us pieces of the man's body?"

"A couple of reasons," Nick said, adjusting his fedora. "First, in that big box, the one with ice all around a smaller box inside it? That's the old merc's head, and we need to preserve it."

Scara raised an eyebrow. "To what end?"

"There are some...cybernetic enhancements in it, at least, we're pretty sure," Nora almost breathlessly told her. "Nick has a friend in Goodneighbour, but it might be a while before we can see her, and we need to preserve his head and brain inside it intact as best we can until then."

Scara frowned. "How do you propose we do that, then?"

"We can cryogenically freeze and store it," Duff said, smiling when her wife tentatively nodded. "Do we have the machine to do so still here?"

"It's in my office," Scara said, warily looking at Piper and Cait. "After having been misused last year by the two of them and Piper's wife in an attempt to freeze dry leaves for some God forsaken reason."

"In our defence, we were very drunk!" Piper nervously called up to her as she went up the stairs with the large box in hand. "It won't happen again!"

"No shit it won't happen again," The teenage boy muttered before turning to scowl at her. "You, Lissy, and Cait are a menace to society, and it's worse if Vadim gets involved...or if any of those power armour geeks from near Quincy do."

Piper rolled her eyes. "Sweet as always, Emmett."

"Some of us actually try to do work," He replied, turning back to his and Duff's experiment. "Alright, so add the..."

"Let me get this straight," Duff put the pieces of Kellogg's body back in the box. "You need to preserve the brain so – I'm guessing Amari, right? – it can be examined by a neurologist. I don't want to know why, and I don't want to know how. But the rest of him? Why did you bring all of this with you? I'm guessing it was a long way back to Diamond City from wherever the three of you went..." She laughed, for a moment, when Dogmeat let out a sad whimper. "Well, wherever the three of you and the cute little dog went. Why go through all this trouble to bring back a body when I'm guessing you three killed him?"