Fallout 3 - Beautiful Stranger

Chapter 7 Part 1

While they had spent time inside Craterside Supplies, night had drawn in. The town of Megaton had lit up like a Christmas tree, staving off the darkness. The multi-coloured string lights trailed along the paths and thoroughfares. Blinking neon signs twinkled and flashed outside the numerous businesses, starting to close for the night.

The citizens of Megaton still packed the thin paths and trails, moving this way and that, talking, arguing, flirting. From here, on the second level, Patience looked down upon them, a little sad and a little proud. The people of the world had suffered the greatest of disasters. Seen the world in flames, but they had continued. They had had children and their children had children. They had survived and, she hoped, one day they might thrive again

She switched off the radio on her Pip-Boy, not wanting to hear any more hyperbole about her, her actions, or her intentions. She had no intentions. Other than learning who she was and where she came from. The mysterious hidden vault that the DJ, Three Dog, had said he didn't know about.

With the revelations that Moira uncovered, Patience began to wonder if finding out about the vault she had emerged from was a good idea, after all. It seemed they had sent her out on some kind of mission, disfiguring her arm in the process, and having some kind of fail-safe in place. To kill her if she failed in her mission? To heal her if things went wrong? She rubbed her arm around the edges of the Pip-Boy. Ever since she had learned about the wires and tubes in her arm, it itched.

The sound of a lighter firing caused Patience to turn around. Valrie had joined her on the platform, tugging and scratching at the coveralls as if she had found them infested with fleas, cigarette dangling from her mouth. The older woman joined Patience at the railing, leaning almost double against it. She tapped ash from her cigarette over the side, then leaned further out to make sure she hadn't hit anybody with it.

"Comes to something when you get thrown outside to have god damned cigarette!" She picked an errant piece of tobacco from her tongue and flicked it aside. "Fucking sensitive equipment!"

"Her house, her rules." Patience smiled, but Valrie didn't seem to catch the smile but nodded at the words.

"See these fuckers?" She pointed at all the people walking through the town, cigarette held between two fingers, the tip glowing faint orange in the night. "None of them have the first fucking idea what they want from life. They get up, eat, go work or scavenge, come home, eat, maybe they get to fuck someone, maybe they don't, then they sleep. That's it. That's all they've got."

"There's a point to this, but I'll be fucked if I can see it." Patience took the cigarette from Valrie's fingers, receiving a sharp look from the older woman. She took a long drag and passed it back.

"The fucking point is, Miss Smart Mouth, that they got it worse than you. They've got nothing to aim for, nothing to learn, nowhere to fucking go! This is it! All they got." Valrie turned around, leaning with her back against the railing, elbows resting upon the top. "You, you got something to aim for. Find out who you are, why you were sent out of your vault. You have a purpose, even if you don't know what is. Jebus Aitch Christ, these fuckers would kill for half that."

"So, what you're really saying is, take my head out of my ass and get on with it?" Patience stood up straight, thrusting her hands into the coverall pockets. There was a hole in one.

"Figure you got me understood." Valrie dropped the almost dead cigarette and crushed it beneath her boot. "Listen, Moira says she's done all she can with that thing. She reckons, maybe, you could get more out of it if you took it to Vault-Tec headquarters."

"And where's that?" Patience lifted her arm and started switching through the options on the Pip-Boy, landing on 'Map'. The harsh green light from the screen making her face look distorted and monstrous.