FO4 | Book 1: Bombs on Monday Morning ✔️

Bonus Chapter: The Detective's New Partner

The dusty old trench coat and worn-out fedora getup wasn't my style, but Nick and Ellie made it sound necessary to the job. I denied, denied, and denied some more until they let me off the hook, Nick laughing about how I wasn't any fun.

I had traveled to Diamond City while waiting on Sturges to finish the Relay. It had been a month since I started hauling scrap from all over back to Sanctuary and it wasn't halfway done yet.

I spent about a week posing as Nick's partner and helping him with a few cases. They were somewhat bizarre.

The first real case I helped with was one about the facial reconstruction surgeon in Diamond City who had accidentally botched up a procedure and lost his mind afterward. He began hacking up the body of the innocent patient in an attempt to "fix him." When I talked to Doc Crocker into lowering his gun from us, he injected himself with enough Psycho to kill him. Needless to say, we had a burial instead of an occupied jail cell.

Nick was impressed with my work nonetheless and paid me a handful of caps. That's when I started taking Ellie's request to train me to be his partner more seriously. This was the closest I was going to get to being a prewar policeman, and I kind of enjoyed playing detective.

Nick had me pick up a few more cases with him, so there I was, wandering around the Commonwealth, looking for clues like some Private Eye.

After I helped Nick with a big case about someone named Marty Bullfinch — who happened to be Nick's last partner and didn't part on good terms — we sat at the noodle stand for a bit to talk. I was tired from fighting Super Mutants, climbing rooftops, and grave robbing.

"How you holding up, Gwen?" he asked. He wasn't eating, of course. Just smoking a cigarette as usual.

I finished swallowing another mouthful of chewed noodles before answering. "I'm alright."

"Huh. You're a tougher nut than I thought. Tougher than I was. Took me a long damn time to get a feel for this place. Thank goodness I found Diamond City. It's got its flaws, sure, but it beats the hell out of anywhere else in the Common'. Course, when I took up there back when, people were just as scared of the Institute as they are now, maybe more."

"You made it work, though," I pointed out.

"Yeah, but the massacre of the CPG was still pretty fresh in people's minds at that point, and folks were still losing sleep over the Broken Mask. Plenty of people thought that I was just a saboteur, moving in to melt down the reactor or poison the drinking water. But, at the time, they couldn't exactly turn me away."

"Massacre of the CPG? What's that?"

"Commonwealth Provisional Government. Years back, a group of settlements tried to get together and form a coalition. Every settlement with even a hint of clout sent representatives to try and has out an agreement. Only the Institute sent a representative of their own: a synth. The man killed every rep at the talks. The CPG was over before it even got off the ground. I took up in town not long after. I was damn lucky they didn't tell me to scram right then and there."

"And the — what did you say? Broken Mask?"

"This was long before I'd moved to town, but apparently some gentleman-type shows up in Diamond City, heads over here to Power Noodles. Guess he didn't like the food, because he pulled his pistol and open-fired on the folks enjoying theirs. When security finally put enough holes in him to drop him, they say he was full of servos and sprockets, just like yours truly. Seems he malfunctioned, went berserk. It was the first time people realized that synths stopped looking like me and started looking like them."

I set my empty bowl down and the Protectron running the stand took it and put it in the small wash basin beside him.

"Considering what these people went through, why did they let you in?" I asked.