A Dungeon Meshi/Fallout Au Fanfiction Project.
I will be posting chapters of the fanfiction + headcanons about the au that i've been working on for the better part of a year now.
Laios rapped his hand against the wall after they stepped through it again and found it was solid. The path to the Golden Country seemed to have been closed off to them forever. The air in the cavern had become frigid, and everyone refused to acknowledge the cold, lest they lose favor with their travelling companions. The catgirl who was still wearing the dress the people of the golden country made for her seemed to suddenly come alive, and her head twisted around as if trying to regain her bearings.
“What the hell was all that!” she shouted.
“We were hoping maybe you could tell us about what you were doing following us!” shouted Marcille.
The girl made a dismissive noise and focused her attention on Laios, seeing as he was the tallest of the group and was most likely the biggest threat if push came to shove. The first rule in the prison yard is to make the biggest guy there your bitch. She walked up and snatched him by the head and held a clawed hand to his throat.
“The big boy is getting cut if you freaks don’t help me,” she said.
“Easy,” said Laios. “Easy. We’ll help you, just tell us what your end game is.”
She released Laios and pushed him up against a wall.
“Easy,” she said. “I’m aiming to get my mutation reversed. You seem to want the same for this clown’s sister, right?”
“It’s possible, but it isn’t common or easy,” said Marcille.
Laios started to rub his neck. “I don’t really understand why anyone would want to reverse a cool mutation, but that’s fine.”
Chilchuck, ignoring the comment made by Laios, decided he would take command of the situation. He stepped up to the girl and said, “Hey, if you give us a name, we can probably help you.”
The girl paused and hissed. “My name is Izutsumi.”
“You were one of Shuro’s retainers, right?” asked Marcille.
“If that’s what you want to call him, sure,” said Izutsumi. “Do you want to explain why I’m wearing a weird dress, commuter?”
“Commuter?” asked Marcille. “It’s just what the people of the Golden Country dressed you in!”
“Where are my weapons?” asked Izutsumi.
Marcille’s eyes widened a bit, and she looked from Laios to Chilchuck. Both of them quickly produced a series of handmade throwing knives, caltrops, and a Nambu pistol with a half spent clip.
“I thought it was a little fucked up for a kid to be carrying a bunch of weapons, then I remembered that we’re in a cave surrounded by irradiated monsters,” said Chilchuck, handing the arsenal back to their owner.
Izutsumi picked up and examined the pistol, making sure each round was accounted for. “These are tricky to get ammo for here.”
God likes to give us all little gifts. But he’s a skinflint, so those gifts often take the form of “poverty” and “horrors”. In a rare act of kindness, God decided to give the party to Izutsumi. They walked together as a group down another passage before they heard a loud clomping.
Laios turned on his Pip-Boy’s flashlight and cast the entire hallway in light. At the far end of the hallway was a shape like someone wearing a suit of T-45 power armor. Before they could react, whoever was inside of it got on all fours and started shamble-sprinting at them like a gorilla.
Senshi of all people made a horrified squeal as they all rushed down the hallway in an effort to get away from it. The T-45 chased them until they reached a large antechamber. Izutsumi pulled out her pistol and started blasting at the neck, hoping to hit something vulnerable, but instead it just kept coming.
“It’s a sentinel suit!” shouted Laios. “It’s piloted by an AI.”
“Son of a bitch!” shouted Marcille. The ghoul lined up her shot and began firing at the legs.
The blast of her rifle’s laser beam melted some of the metal of the legs, and it collapsed. This did little to stop it. It used its arms to crawl after Chilchuck. Dear Chilchuck. Chil scrambled backwards, knowing his .22 pistol would be less than useless against such a horror. That’s when Laios leapt onto the sentinel’s back and held it in a kind of Greek wrestling pose as he pried the piping hot fusion core out of its back.
“I’ve always wanted to try a power armor helmet on,” said Laios.
He ripped the helmet off the set of armor, and to the combined awe of everyone there, a whitish-green gloop oozed out of the head and onto the floor, trying to crawl away.
“Holy hell,” said Chilchuck. “It’s…alive?”
“And we can eat it!” shouted Laios, diving onto the moving ooze.
“No!” shouted Marcille. “We aren’t eating mystery ooze from a set of power armor!”
“You know what,” said Senshi, who had been quiet up until now. “Maybe the Ghoul girl is right, maybe we should skip this monster as a meal.”
Yaad explains what they believe in The Golden Country.
Dinner was something of a surrealist affair. Wine was served and everyone’s favorite synth, Chilchuck managed to polish off a bottle by himself. He had the buttons on his shirt undone and he was lounging back in his chair, his cheeks as red as ripened tomatoes.
“This is incredible stuff, Yaad,” he said. “How old did you say this bottle way?”
“I believe it’s been here since 2068,” said Yaad.
“Incredible stuff,” repeated Chilchuck.
Marcille strutted across the room in a set of black high heeled pumps and a shimmering black dress that looked like something out of a Parisian fashion catalog, complete with diamond shaped shoulders and a black hat that sat awkwardly to the side on her bald head. The cat girl who was with them sat awkwardly at the table, dressed in a peter pan collared dress and looked a bit like a pilgrim. Marcille and the other women found that the catgirl was carrying a variety of weapons, mostly varying types of knives.
“I’ve been meaning to ask about that,” said Marcille as she took her seat at the long table in the mansion’s dining room.
Before she could elaborate further, Senshi and Laios entered the scene. Laios was grinning ear to ear like a child who’d just had every whim they’d ever had indulged to the nth degree.
“We gathered Deathclaw eggs!” exclaimed Laios.
“That’s nice, bud,” said Chilchuck, smiling. “I don’t really care.”
“As I was saying,” continued Marcille, giving Laios a half lidded glare. She focused her attention back on Yaad. “How did you all come to live here? You’re all pre-war, very pre-war if you’re to be believed.”
“It’s kinda complicated,” began Yaad. “Like I said, I’m not a scientist. But my grandfather was. He was a brilliant man, Doctor Freinag Melini. He realized that tensions were rising between China and the United States. The flames of war being stoked by interests stateside, so he created a backdoor. Time is however very weird here. I’ve only aged I’d say roughly ten years physically since we arrived.”
“My father left,” said Yaad. “He left maybe a decade ago. I’m not sure what became of him. I’m of the mindset that he lost our god’s favor when he left The Golden Country.”
“Your god?” asked Marcille, her suspicions immediately raised.
“Yes,” said Yaad. “Most folks don’t really go into the religious thing, which I get. But it feels too big to me to not be real. Several of us are devoted followers of Ug-Qualtoth, a pre-war deity of sorts. This faith was only strengthened by this place. We believe that Ug-Qualtoth is the reason for the constant perfect weather and the barrier that makes dangerous mutants into gentle creatures we can tend to. But, the thing is, despite all of Ug-Qualtoth’s gifts, we who believe, believe our god is in danger.”
“Elaborate,” said Laios. “How do you know when a god is in danger?”
“We believe that my grandfather’s collaborator has imprisoned Ug-Qualtoth deep within the bowels of the caves,” explained Yaad. “His name was Thistle. A child genius of sorts. He worked with my grandfather to construct the entrances to The Golden Country as well as robots to maintain Meliniville around it.”
“What happened to Thistle, Yaad?” asked Laios.
“He’s still around,” said Yaad, whispering like a child scared of being overheard by his parents. “He comes here sometimes…He takes on different shapes. Sometimes he remotely controls a robot. Othertimes, he’s a small ghoul child.”
Marcille shot Laios a look. Laios received it, but kind of cocked his head to the side, confused.
Marcille made an irritated growl, “This Thistle character is probably responsible for what happened to Falin. He probably Frankenstein’ed her into a big, horrible monster because we murdered the Deathclaw.”
“So, you can see why we want to release Ug-Qualtoth,” said Yaad. “With his release, Thistle will be purged and we might be able to heal the wasteland.”
“So, why don’t you leave and seek out Ug-Qualtoth?” asked Laios.
“We would,” said Yaad. “But we fear losing our god’s favor and dying in the darkness. We’re not hardy people. We’re fragile, pre-war creatures.”
“I’ll do it then,” said Laios. “I’ll find Ug-Qualtoth and release it from whatever bonds it’s under and then you can all come to live in the world beyond this.”
---
In their shared room, Marcille repeatedly hit Laios with a pillow.
“Why did you promise him that!” she shouted.
“Quit it!” shouted Laios, after being cruelly battered by the pillow. “It felt right in the moment!”
“She’s right, though,” said Chilchuck, sipping from another bottle. “These people have been stuck in a perpetual good day for the past 200 years. What’s the point of breaking them out? If they can even really get out. I don’t think their god is real.”
“I think this perpetual good day has made them rather bland,” chimed in Senshi. “Do you recall our dinner? It was filling and nutritious, but bereft of flavor.”
“I feel,” began Laios. “After everything we’ve seen, why can’t there be something like a god lurking in the darkest depths of the cave?”
“Because there are no gods,” said Chilchuck. “I was grown in a lab by a scientist named Tim. Tim is the closest thing that there is to a god.”
“I said something like a god,” said Laios. “If it’s a big, intelligent creature that’s capable of doing half of what Yaad thinks it is, we have to pursue it. Thistle obviously thinks that there’s something like it otherwise, why would it have all of these wasteland creatures in one place?”
“If it can fix Falin,” said Marcille after a moment of consideration. “Then we have to pursue it.”
“We can decide what we’re doing in the morning,” said Chilchuck. “Particularly, about her.”
Chil gestured at the catgirl who was asleep on the bed she was sharing with Marcille.
“That does present complications,” said Marcille. “But we can’t just leave her…She’s a teenager, she’ll die in the caves by herself.”
“Like he said,” said Laios. “We can work things out in the morning.”
---
The morning brought breakfast, particularly pancakes. Senshi was only familiar with how pre-war stoves worked in theory from reading manuals, but he got the hang of it after burning the first two griddlecakes.
Pancakes (Pre-War Style)
2 Flour
1 Deathclaw Egg
Brahmin Milk and Butter
Granulated Honey
Pinch of salt
Serves 5-6
+6 Hit Points
-10 Hunger
-4 Agility
-1 Charisma
The pancakes were thick, fluffy, and each one was served with a decent helping of jam made from the pre-war fruit that the residents of The Golden Country grew. The jam was alright, despite itself. None of them had ever had an untainted raspberry before, so the taste was entirely alien to them.
Yaad sat at the table, and Senshi cut his pancakes for him, slowly feeding them to him.
“You see,” said Senshi. “Taste is like a muscle, you have to exercise it. You can’t just eat only for sustenance. There’s something of an art to it. Like making that wine that our young friend seems to love so much.
Yaad was almost crying from how delicious Senshi’s pancakes were.
After breakfast concluded, Yaad drove them back out to where they’d entered the field and they stepped through the doorway and into the caves again. None of them noticed the figure of a ghoul child watching them from afar.
Laios and the party ventured further into the cave town. You have to understand that they were running and trying to figure out what their next plan of action was, without retreating back to the surface and trouble with the few laws of the wasteland. As they were walking, Chilchuck froze and focused on a wall.
“Something’s wrong here,” said Chil. “Look at the wall here.”
The party gathered where Chilchuck stood and Laios, thinking he was being clever, rapped on the wall like it was a door.
“It’s solid, what’s the issue you’re seeing…” began Laios, but then he started to see it too.
The bricks of the wall seemed to shudder and shiver like curtains, though not quite. Laios reached forward and found that his hand was able to go through the wall itself. Intrigued by this new discovery, he walked through the wall.
“Laios!” shouted an exasperated Marcille.
She ran into the wall after him and was quickly joined by Chil and Senshi. What they didn’t notice was the shape stalking in the darkness after them who followed not long after them.
On the opposite side of the wall was sunshine. High in the sky was a glowing, brilliant orb. The air had a different quality about it too. It was almost like it was free of contaminants and all of them had grown up breathing. Beneath their feet was knee high wheat.
“Listen,” said a voice behind the crowd.
Everyone turned and they were met by one of the cloaked girls that was a member of Toshiro’s party. She was now free of her balaclava. She was young and had a set of ears atop her head like a cat’s, but fused into the skin.
“I…” began the cat girl. “I feel weird…Help me.”
She collapsed to the ground and began shaking and shuddering like she was on the receiving end of a seizure.
“Marcille!” shouted Laios.
Marcille didn’t waste time and she rushed to the girl’s side. She worked a ball of fabric into her mouth to keep her from biting off her tongue and began administering a cocktail of chems. A syringe of homebrewed Med-X followed close behind by a Stimpak.
Gradually, she ceased shaking and her eyes darted around. Looking between everybody. She looked at Marcille who immediately noticed that they were extremely dilated. The girl sat up and spat out the rag that Marcille shoved in her mouth.
She began purring and rubbed her head against Marcille.
“Are you okay?!” shouted Marcille.
She responded with an animalistic cat noise.
“What?” asked the ghoul.
“It’s fine,” said a new voice.
Everyone reeled back and they noticed a new figure had entered the scene. A young man with chin length blonde hair and a cool expression like he was permanently locked in a meditative state. He was dressed in a clean argyle sweater, slacks, and a white button up shirt. He looked kind of like a professor from a pre-war comic book. What was most striking was that he was entirely unarmed.
“She’ll be fine,” said the man. “She’s experiencing the pacification wave. It happens when mutants pass through into the Golden Country.”
“What is the Golden Country?” asked Laios.
“You might describe it as a secondary dimension,” said the young man. “A leechworld connected to the Earth. I can’t pretend to know the science of it.”
“Who are you?” asked Marcille. “And what’s wrong with the girl?”
“My name is Yaad,” said the young man. “And as I said, there isn’t anything wrong with her. She’s just pacified. All mutants experience it when passing through the veil…Would you all like to accompany me to town?”
“If it impacts mutations, why am I not feeling it?” asked Marcille.
“Because Ghoulification isn’t strictly a mutation,” said Yaad. “It’s more of a quirk of being. You’re ordained by the universe.”
A silver painted, mint condition Corvega Blitz cut through the wheatfield with everyone piled inside. Yaad was at the wheel and Senshi avoided looking out of the window because of all the wanton destruction being perpetrated against perfectly good wheat.
As the town neared, they were met by a one to one mirror of the cave town. But lit up by the sun and covered in pristine paint. It was like stepping into a pre-war advertisement as they entered the town.
People filed out of their homes and approached the car. The sensory information was almost overwhelming to Chilchuck as his onboard sensor information scanned and found that there wasn’t a single mutation among the gathered crowd. A whole host of people unimpacted by radiation.
“My god,” said Chilchuck. “How long have you people been here? Do you know what the state of the world is?”
“We’re well aware…I guess if I were to accurately summarize how long we’ve been here…The last time we were in the world outside of The Golden Country was 2076,” explained Yaad. “I would have been a boy then.”
“So you’re over 220 years old?” asked Laios.
“Plus fifteen years or so,” corrected Yaad. “But yeah. You can all stay the night in the governor’s mansion.”
Yaad directed his focus and gestured down the street toward the only house that towered over the other houses.
“I want to examine your farming facilities,” said Senshi.
“As you wish,” said Yaad. “It’s not often that we get friendly visitors. Occasionally, we find deathclaws on the edge and we raise them for their eggs.”
“You do animal husbandry with deathclaws?” asked a smiling Laios.
“Naturally, once they pass through the barrier, they’re entirely docile,” said Yaad.
“I’d like to see them too!” shouted Laios, but he quieted himself for the follow-up. “If that isn’t too much trouble.”
“I’ll walk you both there myself,” said Yaad.
A group of women approached Marcille and the girl from Toshiro’s party.
“We were hoping you could follow us, we’ve not had the opportunity to meet a ghoul in person,” said one woman. “So…what’s it like?~”
If Marcille could, she’d be blushing.
“I well…Necrosis is nothing to write home about, but I think it’s fine…adjacent. Except when bigots are concerned,” said Marcille.
“Oh you poor thing,” said one of the women. “Would you mind if we did a bit of dress up with you? We also don’t get the opportunity to do new outfits.”
The parties rematerialized just outside of the town proper, in a field just adjacent to Baker’s Row, so named because the neighborhood was clustered around a bakery that was built out of the remains of an old shuttle bus. Kabru and company laid out Daya’s body so that she could face the sun. Well…face, might be a generous way to describe the pulped mess that made up her head, but it was the thought that counted, right?
Kabru noticed something in the distance, though; it was a steamship, docked alongside all the usual customers. It wasn’t like any of the fishing boats or little sailboats that littered the flooded lake that surrounded Melini.
“Mick,” called out Kabru. “Use your advanced vision and tell me what’s on the front of that boat.”
Mickbell ran up to the hill where Kabru stood, and he stared out across the field and down to the docks.
“It’s got a bird of some kind on it,” said Mickbell. “Maybe a canary?”
“Shit, fuck,” growled Kabru.
Kabru craned his head around, and he saw Toshiro marching off. He ran over to seize the man by the hand.
“What?” asked Toshiro.
“You, follow me, things have gone tits up in the worst way imaginable,” said Kabru as he ran with Toshiro in the direction of the mayor’s palatial mansion.
They arrived outside and found Namari, Kaka, and Kiki standing guard.
“Hey Shuro, been a minute, how are things?” asked Namari.
“There isn’t any time,” snapped Kabru. “Where’s the mayor?”
Namari gestured with her head at the building. “He’s meeting with some ghouls from the NCR.”
“Fuck,” repeated Kabru.
“What’s the issue?” asked Toshiro.
“The Canaries have arrived on the island. That means the little patch of irradiated hell that we call The Cave has become unstable.”
“Oh shit,” muttered Namari. “I figured they were important, but I didn’t figure they were that damn important.”
Namari ascended the stairs and then threw the doors open for them.
“You didn’t explain to me what’s so important about some random ghouls?” asked Toshiro.
“They’re the New California Republic’s Special Problems Unit,” explained Kabru. “After the second battle of Hoover Dam, the NCR set up task forces of ghouls and supermutants that they’d send on suicide missions to pacify areas or to remove irradiated monsters so land could be settled and developed.”
Kabru found the mayor’s office and burst open the doors. He was met by a bunch of cloudy eyes falling upon him. The mayor looked positively neutered as he sat in his chair while six ghouls dined on fine meats, cheeses, and drank his wine. Mister Tansu stood to the side and watched with a dour expression on his face as he watched this play out.
“I seek an audience with the mayor!” shouted Kabru, but he didn’t need to; all conversation had ceased the moment he entered.
“Mind your tongue, boy, serious business is being conducted in here,” scolded Mister Tansu.
“It’s fine by me,” said a ghoul wearing a slightly curly blonde wig. “Let the smoothskin speak his peace.”
“It’s about the cave, sir,” said Kabru. “A new kind of monster has made itself known deep within the depths of it.”
“And?” asked one of the canaries, this one was a woman with a bald head (though that’s hardly atypical for ghouls). “We’re already here, we’ll take care of whatever beasties go bump in the night.”
“I think we need to slowly evacuate the cave,” said Kabru. “There are still prospectors and merchants on the upper levels of the cave.”
“You’re awfully bold,” said another ghoul. He had a glass eye the color of polished obsidian, and he peered at Kabru with his good eye. His tone was different from any other ghoul that Kabru had met; it was smooth and not quite crackly like a typical ghoul voice. “How did you come by your information? Hmm?”
“I saw it first hand,” said Kabru. “Also…My mother was one of your number for a time. I know how your intelligence-gathering operations are carried out. I hoped to bring this information to the forefront before anyone went down into the cave.”
“Hmm?” offered a taller ghoul of a slightly darker complexion and a silver colored wig. “Are you Milsiril’s kid? I remember seeing you as a child. You’ve grown quite a bit.”
“Yes,” said Kabru. “In addition, this new monster. It used to be human, but it’s been twisted into some kind of new shape. Imagine a centaur, but larger and with some kind of psyker capabilities.”
“Good god,” muttered the bald woman again.
“Your recommendations are sound,” said the glass-eye ghoul. “I want it to be known that I do not trust you, not even a little. You’ve got something of the devil about you, mister blue eyes.”
Rin immediately started to scream when confronted by this twisted abomination of a mutant before them. She’d seen centaurs before. She’d even seen mutant hounds and the results of FEV that failed to render people into super-mutants. But this was something wholly new and grotesque.
“Nobody needs to attack! She’s just scared!” urged Laios, but his words were not heeded.
Falin had glided down on those little protrusions that were described as wings, they looked little more than something vestigial. Around flew insects, things the size of cats that would feast on rats the size of dogs.
“Bloodbugs!” shouted Kabru as the insects descended upon the combined parties of explorers.
Tade attempted to rush the Falin-thing with her rebar-laden club only for the thing to seize her by the face with a wet, fleshy talon and fling her into one of the houses, smashing wooden frames and everything in the super-mutant’s path.
Nobody stood a chance against the thing as she wrecked through house after house in some sort of mad search for something. Anytime anyone attempted to get close, they were hit by the radius of psychic energy, and it threw them back hard.
Kabru, brave, murderous, but virtuous, Kabru scampered up Falin’s frame with a knife and dug it into her chest, jabbing in her neck, lungs, and heart, but she threw him to the ground like he was just another piece of garbage and flew off, leaving a trail of foul-smelling blood in her wake.
The bloodbugs, by contrast, were incredibly easy for most of the skilled wastelanders to dispatch. Every one of them had encountered bloodbugs in the past, especially in flooded areas where they liked to breed. That meant that beyond the town lay some kind of body of water that was, as of then, undiscovered.
The slaughter had seemingly halved Kabru’s party. Daya was dead; she was killed when Falin first leapt off of one of the taller buildings, and she’d seized the little woman and squashed her like an insect. This left Rin, Holm, possibly Mick, and Kuro.
Toshiro’s party was relatively unscathed, with only their robots destroyed, Tade suffering a head injury, and their mysterious cloaked girl having vanished in the chaos that ensued.
Laios and Toshiro stood in the center of the chaos and both men looked at each other with a kind of harrowing, monstrous hatred that seemed to radiate from Toshiro.
“Do you see!” shouted Toshiro, allowing some rage to creep into his otherwise neutral tone. “We have to track her down and put her out of her misery before she kills anybody else, Laios!”
“There’s got to be a way to reverse this!” returned Laios. “Don’t you see, all I’m doing is trying to protect her.”
“You’re going to get people killed and prolong her suffering!”
Laios couldn’t take it anymore and delivered a brick-breaking slap across Toshiro’s jaw, sending the man staggering back from being hit by one of Laio’s powerful paws.
But was our boy, our man, our hero Toshiro stopped? Hell no. He rushed Laios, and the two men engaged in a foppish slap fight while everyone gathered the dead or broken machinery from around the site.
Holm emerged from a hole he’d hastily dug in the lawn of one of the houses while Chil and Mick were discovered inside an overturned fridge beneath some rubble. It was a miracle those two weren’t dead.
Meanwhile, Laios and Toshiro exchanged blows and hurled insults at one another like children on a playground might. Hair was pulled, eyes were blackened, and despite all the death around them, everyone found this to be the most tiring of displays.
“I really thought he’d outgrown his aggressive streak,” commented Maizuru.
Once everyone had been gathered, Senshi went looking and discovered a few of the bloodbugs, clutches of eggs.
“I wish we had some oatmeal and time,” commented Senshi. “I’d love to make some of these bloodbugs into black pudding.”
Maizuru regarded the little man and his collection of eggs. “Perhaps omelettes?”
“Do you happen to have rice on your person?” asked Senshi.
“Not one me currently, but with our supplies, yes.”
Toshiro finally went down after sustaining a few blows from Laios.
“Do you see, Shuro! I have been eating a balanced meal every day since we went down here, and you have been neglecting yourself and pushing yourself to the physical limit!” shouted Laios.
Maizuru sighed and she and Senshi set up a pair of campfires and began to cook their respective meals.
The rice was boiled relatively easily, but it was the egg dish that Senshi began crafting that required the most focus.
“One egg per person should do it,” he commented to nobody in particular.
He used a knife to slice open the gelatinous membrane of the bloodbug eggs and emptied them into a bowl, repeating this until his collection was exhausted. He then salted them and stirred until they became a yellow-green mix. Following that, he poured the egg mix into a hot pan and began to gently roll until he had a series of fist sized omelettes ready for each person gathered at the scene.
Bloodbug Tamagoyaki (and Rice)
1 Bloodbug Egg per person.
Pinch of Salt (to taste)
Oil (little bit)
Serves those who survived
+2 rads
-8 hunger
-1 Agility for 2 hours.
Toshiro, lying on the ground, half-willingly allowed Maizuru to feed him the rice, but he wouldn’t touch the omelette.
“Is that how you all have been surviving down here? Eating wasteland cuisine?” quipped Kabru.
“Yeah!” exclaimed Laios before offering the shorter man a roll of his omelette.
Kabru stood back and weighed his options:
The idea of eating the omelette disgusted him beyond belief.
Eating it would ingratiate him with Laios, and he wanted to learn more about this bizarre man.
Kabru selected option two and apprehensively unhinged his jaw to accept Laios’s forkful of omelette into his mouth. The saltiness of the omelette was overwhelming, but it wasn’t wholly bad…To be frank, though, the only thing that kept Kabru from vomiting was the little voice in the back of his mind that told him that he needed to eat it to keep Laios happy, because god only knew what the man’s goals were. He knew from his fight with Toshiro that his primary goal involved saving his sister, but did that mean he would unwittingly unleash a mutated monster into the world?
Meanwhile, Laios was just thinking about what a cool guy Kabru seemed to be. Especially after having a knockdown, drag-out fight with Toshiro.
When everything had settled down, the slightly rejuvenated Toshiro approached Laios with his eyes heavy.
“I’m going to return to the surface with my retainers,” said Toshiro. “I…It pains me to do it, but I’m going to have to report what I’ve seen to the local authorities. Then I’m leaving for home.”
“I understand,” said Laios. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop; we’re going to cure whatever this is with Falin.”
“I’m going to return with him,” said Kabru. “We have to bury Daya and report what happened to her husband…He’s going to be beyond devastated, but I'm rooting for you. Don’t mess things up.”
Toshiro produced a handheld radio from his bag and handed it to Laios.
“Contact us using this and we’ll ferry you off Melini and out of NCR territory if things get dicey with Falin,” said Toshiro.
“Thanks…I’m sorry for hitting you,” said Laios.
“I apologize in kind,” said Toshiro. “I’ll see you on the surface if you survive.”
The other two parties gathered in the edge of the cave town and dropped a couple of relay grenades, vanishing in a puff of smoke and a crackle of electricity.
The gang sat in a circle around an unlit fire, the only light provided by Laios’s Pip-Boy. They could hear something was flapping its wings high above them, and they didn’t know if it was Falin or another one of the cave’s myriad irradiated horrors.
Laios stared wild-eyed at the fire, as if his solemn gaze would spark the coals to life.
“Laios?” asked Marcille, placing a hand on his shoulder.
“I just…I expected to be hauling back a corpse,” said Laios.
Chil was about to say that they should take refuge in one of the houses, but his powerful synthetic ears picked up something further down one of the entrance tunnels to the cave town. It was a crowd of footsteps, some mechanical, others human.
“We’ve got company,” said Chil as he directed his gaze down one of the tunnels.
Everyone got to their feet and armed themselves.
Laios looked down at his Pip-Boy and said, “Whatever they are, I don’t think they’re hostile.”
A series of light balls flew up into the air, illuminating this new band of travellers. At the head was a pair of men, one of whom everyone had seen before. Another was a face known only to a few other members of the party.
Laios sheathed his sword and cut across the gravel lawns of the cave town to the man he knew as Shuro. He wrapped him in a big, aggressive hug that threatened to lift the would-be samurai into the air.
Toshiro looked thinner than he ought to be, his face was gaunt, and he didn’t have that close, clean-shaven appearance that Laios and company had come to expect from him, but all in together, Laios was just happy to see a man whom he considered to be a close friend.
“He’s overly familiar,” muttered Maizuru to herself in a language Laios only half understood from his conversations with Toshiro.
When Laios released Toshiro, he clapped him on the shoulder appreciatively. “You have no idea how good it is to see you. Have you been eating?”
“He has not,” chided Maizuru in English.
“There isn’t any time,” said Toshiro. “Have you found it? Did you find the deathclaw that slew Falin?”
Laios’s smile faded, and he took a step back, “Yes. We defeated it, Shuro. You don’t need to worry anymore.”
“And Falin?” asked Toshiro, who felt his entire body shake. It was as if the structure threatened to turn inwards.
“She’s alive,” said Laios. “But we got separated.”
Kabru, who stood beside, watched this and studied Laios’s face. He could smell the stench of deception on the tall, blonde man, and frankly, the aroma was delicious.
A smile briefly interrupted Toshiro’s dour yet neutral expression, but he quickly corrected back to being neutral.
“You need rest, my lord,” said Maizuru as she subtly put herself between Laios and Toshiro. “And importantly, you need to eat. I shall have everyone prepare a meal for you.”
“I take it you were the local bumpkin our lord was paling around with?” said Hien.
“That’s right,” said Laios, not having the context for anything the ninja-like woman was saying.
---
Rin and Kabru split off from the main group to talk while everybody else engaged one another in conversation. Senshi and Maizuru began to cook together, mixing some rice and dried fish into patties before frying them.
“Aren’t you going to confront them?” asked Rin in hushed tones.
“Nah,” said Kabru. “Did you see the way he looked at us? His expression wasn’t filled with guilt. But he is hiding something and I intend to suss it out.”
Kabru cut across the field and went over to Laios and Kabru. It only occurred to him when he was that close that Laios was a lot taller than him. Taller and more built. Laios was a boy who ate, and it powered him.
“Forgive me,” said Kabru. “I couldn’t help but be curious about you. You said that you slayed the deathclaw, right? That’s no easy feat.”
“That’s about right,” said Laios. “It wasn’t an easy fight, that’s for sure. I’m Laios, good to meet you.”
Kabru stared at him for half a second too long. They’d met sort of on multiple occasions, but this guy simply didn’t remember? That was unlikely. What sort of cryptic game was the Touden brother playing at with him?
“Would you excuse me for a moment? I need to talk with Shuro in private,” said Laios.
Laios and Toshiro walked off into one of the abandoned houses, and they were followed by a woman who was dressed head to toe in black, even covering her face and head. Kabru remembered Kuro following her during their walk to the cave town, growling the entire time as if something about her just didn’t quite smell right to him.
---
Once they were alone in the living room of an abandoned house that clearly looked like it had been the sleeping quarters for some super-mutants. Laios sat Toshiro down and began to speak to him.
“Falin is alive, but she was turned into something else,” said Laios. “Some kind of monster.”
“What?” hissed Toshiro, standing up. “What do you mean?”
“What I mean is the situation is beyond complicated,” said Laios. “When we arrived, we expected to find her in the deathclaw, but she wasn’t. She was somewhere in the town being experimented on.”
“That’s insane,” said Toshiro. “What do you mean? Tell me everything you saw, immediately.”
“It was like…Have you ever seen a centaur before?” asked Laios.
“Like from a picture book?” asked Toshiro.
“No, no,” said Laios. “Of the supermutant variety. She was like a mix of a deathclaw, bat, and herself, but rendered impossibly big. I’m telling you this now because I trust you. We are gonna fix her somehow.”
“Fix her!?” shouted Toshiro. “The only thing that can fix that is death, Laios!”
A horrible screech pierced the air, and something flew down onto the scene.
Toshiro and Laios rushed out to see that the party was being waylaid by Falin in her glorious chimera form.
Kabru came too on another level with someone waving his hand in his face. This was days earlier, mind you, days before the Falin-thing crawled screaming out of the lab.
“It seems the drug you were under the influence of has worn off,” said Mister Tansu, giving Kabru a light slap to his face. “You’re lucky that someone placed you on a well-travelled path, otherwise, you might have ended up being food for raiders.”
Kabru vaguely remembered a gun battle with a cult of atomites and a blonde man. He didn’t believe the man was actively involved in the fight, but he remembered that and something like herbal tea on his tongue. Otherwise, there was nothing.
He searched his person and found he was without the meager supplies they’d brought into the caves.
The others did the same and found that they too were without food. They had their caps and a stack of NCR bills but nothing to eat. They were fucked beyond belief.
“Well,” said Kabru, “We’ve got no choice but to head back for the surface. We can resupply there, then come back down here and deal with the food thieves.”
“Have it your way then,” said Mister Tansu before teleporting away, along with the rest of his party, in a flash of electricity.
The party walked along a path that took them along the bounds of an underground lake.
Internally, Kabru was in the process of eliminating different prospector groups that could have been responsible for the theft of their food. He was at the head of the group as they walked along, and that’s when things started to get heavy. The air was flooded with a noxious green fog.
Kabru stood alone, surrounded by feral ghouls, but they did not attack him. He drew his revolver and aimed it at one who rushed him with…the ghoul was holding a chain-fed minigun and was swatting at him with it.
He’d never known ferals to use tools, let alone guns, to bash people. The feral was also low to the ground, and Kabru made a deductive leap that would astound most. Even as a headache was starting to form in the front of his skull.
He got around the creature and placed them in an arm lock before whispering, “Daya” into her ear.
The creature stopped squirming and gradually started to look more human in Kabru’s eyes. This wasn’t a sudden feral attack, they were being drugged by this noxious green fog.
Kabru cast his eyes around, and he noticed one of the ghouls barked while another feral fled off into the mists. He immediately singled them out as Mick and Kuro. That left Holm and Rin. Holm was crouched down and staring off into space.
Then there was Rin. Rin, who looked almost like herself only with mottled skin and long stringy black hair. Rin, who had a halo of electric light around her ghoulish head, while the rocky floor started to shift and rise suddenly.
Kabru knew immediately that her psi-talent was showing, and she could potentially kill all of them with brain anurysems or simply blow up their heads.
He did the only thing he thought was sensible and rushed across the room and pressed his lips to her, breaking her psychic concentration.
The moment didn’t feel great for either of them. For a split second, it was like they were both lip to lip with a toothy piece of beef jerky.
A blast of psi-energy still sounded, but it cut through the minds of the party, revealing their true forms to one another and showing off the true culprits in this scheme.
Just to the north of them was a party of raiders dressed in road leathers and battered wasteland armor. Each was suited with their own heavily customized gas masks. The catch with these raiders was that they were unarmed, save for a set of hallucinagen grenades that they got from who knows where.
“Oh shit,” said the raider at the head of the party.
Kabru started towards them, holstering his pistol and drawing a great big fuck off dagger.
“Listen, man,” began the leader of the party of raiders.
“No,” said Kabru. “You will listen. It’s illegal for parties of prospectors to kill one another…but you’re raiders. You’ve only come down here to loot people and steal their stuff…You’re kind of like tumors.”
He seized the head raider by the collar of his leather jacket and drew the blade across his neck, splashing his fear-riddled compatriots with his crimson life.
One of them tried to run, but Kabru was fast with his revolver. He pulled it out and fanned out three shots to the legs, sending him down to the ground screaming. He popped the other two in the head with single shots each before walking over to the fallen man and blowing his head off.
Once more, Kabru was covered in blood and satisfied with a job well done. He had a smile on his face as he returned to his party. Mickbell ran over to the corpses and began looting them.
“Hey, chief,” said Mick. “These guys were loaded. Caps, chems, and more food than we could ask for.”
“Fantastic,” said Kabru, dipping his hands into the water to wash the blood off his face. Unaware that the action was attracting something cruel. “Not a huge shock that the raiders down here are making bank off of the would be thrill seekers.”
Rin sat by the water’s edge, stewing. Daya and Mickbell were tasked with dumping the raider corpses in the water. Fish food for the creatures that dwelled beneath.
Kabru looked over at Rin. “You’re brooding again. Sorry about that. It was just the quickest thing I could think of to get us out of that bind.”
“Well, it worked,” she said, wincing at the sense-memory of kissing what she’d started thinking of a Ghoul-bru.
“Nice shooting out there, Tex,” said Holm. “Are you hurt?”
Kabru shook his head. “I’m fine, thanks.
The group sat down on the edge of the lake and began to dine. Dinner was stolen dried brahmin jerky, dried mutfruit, and a jar of cactus fruit aspic.
+10 hp was restored to each party member
-6 hunger abided.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Kabru. “When we come back down. We should go after whoever’s stolen our food. I’ve been going through my internal Rolodex, and I think I’ve come up with a decent suspect.”
“Oh?” offered Daya. “What’s up?”
“After the fight with the children of Atom, I remember vaguely glimpsing a blonde man, a ghoul, and a synth.”
“That’s a specific party makeup,” said Mick, sarcasm heavy in his voice.
“There’s not a whole lot of parties who would willingly travel with a ghoul is the thing,” said Kabru. “Too much bigotry wrapped around the possibility of them going feral…So I think we’re looking at the Touden party…but there’s something up about them. They aren't moving with a full set anymore.”
“What makes you figure?” asked Mick.
“I don’t recall seeing the sister anywhere,” said Kabru. “I know she and the ghoul are former Followers, and they tend to do whatever they can to heal.”
“It goes with their philosophy,” said Rin.
“So that means that she’s missing. I also recall seeing their former heavy guns girl with the party that woke us up,” said Kabru.
“That’s Namari,” explained Daya. “Her dad was a bigshot gun runner for the island before he fucked off after embezzeling a bunch of caps.”
“There’s also the lack of the Japanese man, Shuro,” said Kabru. “I know he came to the island some time after his ship docked in St. Babs. He split with his original party after falling in love with the sister. So the sister is the main piece in the party splitting up. She’s gone. Missing even.”
“It’s disturbing how much you know about all of these people,” commented Rin.
Kabru batted his eyelashes at Rin. “Ignoring that.”
He then continued. “So, the sister’s missing. The party’s split up. They’re desperate.”
“I’m surprised if it’s Chilchuck that’s still with them,” commented Mickbell. “The man’s a greedy little shit and thinks he’s the representative of all synths on the island with his little guild. If I were in the guild, he’d pitch a fit about me having Kuro work for me. He thinks he’s hot shit because he was purpose built by The Institute for ruin exploration.”
Mickbell took the cyberdog by the face and began to gently play with his jowl. Kuro allowed this, thriving off of the attention.
“You wanna work for me, don’t you, buddy?” said Mickbell, putting on a baby voice.
Kuro wagged his tail enthusiastically.
“That leaves the Touden siblings,” said Kabru. “They and their ghoul friend are almost complete unknowns to me. They used to loot some of the good tech from the upper floors, and they once donated proceeds from a hunt to party members who couldn’t go down anymore due to injuries.”
“A happy enough ending,” said Rin.
“That’s until you realize that the party members I’ve mentioned weren’t injured at all. They’re running illegal goods off and onto the island. All set up by a hefty payout from the Toudens,” said Kabru. “I think they’re making a power play, and if they can unlock the secrets of this cave, they could lead a small time coup against the mayor.”
“Kabru,” said Mickbell. “You hate the mayor.”
“I do,” said Kabru. “But he’s a useful stooge for maintaining order. If he goes, what happens then? People will stop going down into the cave. The population of the monsters down here grows, and they overrun Melini.”
“It sounds like you’re catatrophizing,” said Daya.
“I am not. Wasteland horrors overrun settlements every day if their populations aren’t kept in check,” Kabru said with a haunted look in his very pretty blue eyes. “It isn’t raiders or the enclave or brotherhood shitheads. It’s the things that go bump in the night that you can’t reason with.”
The entire party fell silent and finished their meal.
That’s when the water began to rumble. A thing that finished eating the bodies of the raiders had risen to the surface. A glorious mirelurk queen, a mess of insect-like feelers and legs underneath a world-breaking carapice.
“Everyone fan out!” shouted Kabru, and everyone followed suit.
The queen began spraying a stream of noxious chemicals, and Kabru began firing at it with his revolver. He kept hitting it, but nowhere crucial.
“Damn!” he shouted. He couldn’t even begin to imagine where a carotid artery on this thing fell.
Something leapt onto his shoulders, and before he could react, Kabru saw a young woman dressed in black leaping from him and onto the Mirelurk Queen. She had a grenade in her hand, and she shoved it into some space beneath the shell before diving into the water like an old world olympian. She emerged on the bank, and an explosion rocked the giant crab to the side.
The women shouted something in Japanese, and a super mutant…or something that looked very similar to a super mutant cut across the lake and bashed it with a giant rebar club, knocking it toward a man dressed like an ancient samurai.
The man’s face was drawn, his eyes looked heavy and dark, and his face was covered in the scratchy-looking beginnings of a beard. He drew his katana and angled the blade side up before slashing north along the thing’s head and shell, cleaving a massive gash in the monster before it fell.
He turned away from the monster as it began to sink back into the lake. He seemed tired of everything that had transpired. A woman in white robes rushed to his side, she was accompanied by robots that were unlike any that Kabru had seen before. They floated across the water like a Mister Handy might, but they were boxy and human-shaped. If he didn’t know better, he might have thought they were men in suits. But then she was suddenly flanked by this horrible looking robot that was the size of a radscorpion and shaped like a spider.
The man and the woman in the white robes exchanged words, and they began to walk away, but Kabru closed the distance between them. He immediately recognized this man from the Touden party.
“They used to call you ‘Shuro, ’ didn’t they?” asked Kabru.
The man turned to him. “My name is Toshiro,” he answered in English with annoyance heavy in his voice.
“I know that…I also know you’re seeking Falin Touden,” said Kabru, smiling softly.
At this, Toshiro’s eyes widened and he was suddenly more expressive, “Where is she? Have you found her corpse?”
“No,” said Kabru. “But if you like, we can help you.”
“It has the same scar above its eye and scale pattern. By all sense, this should be it?” pondered Laios after he split open the intestinal tract.
There wasn’t even the remains of Falin’s Pip-Boy. Laios ran through a series of calculations and carefully curated animal facts in his head. He was certain that Falin’s corpse should have still been inside the Deathclaw. It had only been a week.
Marcille placed a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “Hey, look. We tried our best, we just didn’t get here in time to recover her.”
Laios sat silently, taking it all in as he gradually rose to his feet. He realized during this entire week that he hadn’t had a moment to himself to properly grieve the loss of his sister. He’d always placed it to the side and thought that he could wait until they could take her back to the surface and bury her. Now, that moment was snatched from him.
Marcille felt similarly. Her best friend and the woman she considered to be her closest companion was gone forever without so much as a tetechy piece of tech to show for it. Some part of her knew that given a peaceful life, she would outlive Falin, though she didn’t want it to happen so soon. And Falin was so young, to be twenty-two and dead felt criminal.
Senshi had already started on the meat of the beast. Cutting off large flanks of it and frying it up in his pan.
Marcille, bloodsoaked, was ready to hit the little Santa-man. But refrained. They could still get further revenge on this beast in one way. And that was through good home cooking.
Senshi began to speak, and the less aggrieved Chil began to help him with his task.
“First, we cut the flanks into thin strips and fry with oil, provided to us from the homes of our super-mutant friends,” said Senshi.
Chilchuck began to prepare a simple bread with flour, water, oil, and salt. He flattened it out into a large disk, and when Senshi’s pan was free of meat, he placed it in the bottom and grilled it on both sides like a pancake.
“I prepare an unleavened bread for a crust,” explained Chilchuck, who was looked on with approval by Senshi.
Chilchuck then began to prepare some of the vegetables left over from their time with the mutants. Tomatoes were sliced, diced, then rendered into a fine paste, which was combined with water and wasteland herbs.
Dinner was very somber, with Marcille and Laios lazily shoveling the resulting food into their mouths. It was good. The meat was tender and savory, but the victory felt hollow. This wasn’t something celebrated with the songs of a hard-fought battle. This was something cold, despite the wine the Chilchuck drunk and the generous meal before them. Even Senshi could feel it.
“At least,” said Marcille, fighting back tears. “This will be the last monster meal we’ll have to eat before we make it back to the surface.”
This did nothing to comfort Laios. Few things would provide comfort in this terrible moment.
---
The party is ignorant, however, of how much worse things will get. In the inner buildings of the cave town, there lies a lab. In this lab, there’s a body lying on a slab. It’s the body of a woman in her twenties or so. She’s still alive, a billion needles stick out of her spine and each pump, sending a flood of the Forced Evolutionary Virus and a billion other groovy things into her bloodstream.
Her eyes shoot open, and she screamed. She screams, but the party does not hear her, long assuming her to be dead. Her body shifts and undulates, her lower half becomes a malformed mass with four extra limbs.
A great hologram appeared behind her, the shining face of a ghoul who said to her, “You will be as my dragon and my champion, and you will destroy those who seek to pillage my town and my home.”
The Behemoth exploded out of the laboratory house and screeched, shaking the foundations of the cave town.
---
The party could feel the ground shake, and everyone was on their feet in an instant.
Laios’s expression shifted from somber to razor-focused. Maybe he was wrong, maybe this was the deathclaw that took his sister.
The group went outside and witnessed a very queer sight. There was a swarm of Mister Handy robots; their long mechanical limbs had attached themselves to the body of the deathclaw and had begun to fly it away as they watched.
They felt the ground shake again, and this time it was punctuated with another screeching roar that shattered windows all over this town. One of the robots split off from the swarm and immediately began to clean up the glass.
“So that’s how the town always stays clean,” muttered Laios as he drew his sword.
“Not the time, Laios,” countered Chilchuck, drawing a pistol for as much good as that would do against one of the monsters of the depths.
The Behemoth wandered through the maze of homes and buildings, her long tail lashing and crashing against the buildings and rendering them into piles of bricks and rubbish. The party froze as they recognized the unmistakable image of Falin Touden entering the light. Where she once walked on two legs, she now has the oversized body of a deathclaw, with a pair of vestigal insect-like wings resting on her hinde-back. There was something like a halo of impossible energy around her head that lit her face, showing off an expression of pure malice.
“Laios, what the fuck is that!” shouted Chilchuck as his mind tried to make sense of what they were seeing.
“I…I don’t know, but it’s Falin!” shouted Laios.
The Falin Behemoth’s halo of energy grew bright as the sun, lighting the entire town before she took off, flying into the higher levels of the cave-town.
Its grounded posture and unusual concave neck and horns provide it the means to echo its sounds an incredible distance. By rapidly expanding and collapsing its vocal sacs it can imitate gunfire at such a decibel that it ruptures eardrums at close range.
A great mystery has begun, noble reader. I am so pumped up by pure coffee. The mutated deathclaw in this story is based on "The Screamer" by @Endivinity
https://www.tumblr.com/endivinity/759935875704569856/screamer-colored-its-tripod-posture-and-unusual?source=share
The air in the cave town is stagnant and cold. Moisture beads on the sides of the buildings, but strangely, all of them are free of mold. Many travellers who have had the opportunity and the skill to reach the cave town have noticed this phenomenon, though none of them have an explanation for it. It’s a bizarre quirk of the underground.
Marcille began setting up what was to be a precise trap. She left a trail of gunpowder after ripping open whatever bullets the crew had to spare, much to the protestation of our man, Chilchuck.
“The goal is simple,” said Laios. “Chilchuck and I will lead the deathclaw into this building.”
He gestured at the two-story house with its redbrick structure.
“And Marcille will detonate it to knock the deathclaw out. When it goes down, Senshi and I will cut vital arteries in the neck.”
“Then we’ll get revenge on the thing that took Falin from us,” said Marcille with heart.
Laios nodded in affirmation.
The ground shook as they felt the beast getting closer. They cast their eyes down the alley and assumed their positions. Each member of the party fought back the urge to run and flee this terrible place for a better life with less strife aboveground. But they all knew that there wasn’t any going back. This isn’t a place that you can run from. If it wasn’t the deathclaw down here, it would be one on the surface.
Somehow, the beast seemed bigger than it was when they first encountered it. Its horns were long and twisted and curled until the sharp tips pressed against its neck. Teeth jutted out and like the horns were curled. But it had the same crimson scale pattern that they’d seen on the monster that had claimed Falin’s life. It was just horribly mutated by something none of them cared to know.
“Holy shit,” whispered Marcille.
The beast crained its head to the side and opened its mouth. The teeth were almost like rubber as they pushed to the sides, and it made a foul screech that propelled a breath that was heavy with the stench of the dead.
Then it sprinted at them, its claws out to the sides, scraping brickwork and shingles off of the building, causing them to fall inward and smash against the ground.
This thing wasn’t simply an Alpha Deatclaw anymore, it was if a wrym from mythology had been reborn through the cruelties of radiation and wasteland mutation.
Marcille ran and hid inside with Senshi while Chilchuck and Laios stood in the direct path of the beast, waving their arms and making a tone of noise as it started on them. Once more, it made that hideous screech that made buildings shake and glass break.
Laios and Chilchuck split off down two parallel allies, and lucky for the synth, the monster wanted larger prey and took off after Laios.
Marcille breathed a sigh of relief and started with Senshi to build a fire. Never in her life had she been so excited to eat one of the wasteland’s apex predators. She imagined herself feasting alone on this thing, this horror that likely ripped Falin into barely recognizable pieces.
The beast made a noise that sounded like gunfire as it sprinted after Laios, who ducked deftly into alleys only for the thing to break through and continue the chase through collapsing buildings, especially when they got further out to the suburbs.
Marcille ran into houses in the suburbs of the cave town and began to work the ovens until the pilot lights broke. Chilchuck came in behind her with pressure cookers scavenged from the homes and used them as improvised bombs, turning entire homes into explosive deathtraps.
Fires went underway, and buildings went “BOOM”! The sudden flood of light and stinging from shrapnel enforced the deathclaw’s path after Laios, in addition to pissing it off something fierce.
The deathclaw ran until Laios led it into the building. The beast forced its head and body through a door that was never meant for a beast of its size. It reached inside like a cat, all thrashing and clawing, hungry for this tasty morsel. I screeched again, and Laios was brought to his knees by its call, it was almost enough to shatter his eardrums. He crawled out through the back door right as Marcille ignited the building, causing it to fall inward.
“Soup’s on!” she shouted, digging a kitchen knife out of her coat and walking up to the unconscious creature with Senshi. While the little bearded Santa-man slashed open the monster’s neck, she was stabbing at it with reckless abandon. “How do you like it! How do you like it!”
By that time, the creature’s life had ended, and it was just Marcille, covered in blood, still stabbing at the hide and prying open scales to dig her knife into the meat.
“Jesus Christ,” muttered Laios as he watched his friend’s bloodlust remain unsatisfied by the creature’s death.
The group started to remove brickwork from the fallen creature, remembering what they’d come there to do. It wasn’t just about murdering a horror show from the depths of the cave. It was about Falin, goddamn it.
Laios drew his sword and ran its blade along the lower abdomen of the monster. He recalled it’s anatomy very well from research guides, and with his hands, he pulled the skin back, revealing a mess of organs.
When he got to the distended and growth-covered belly, he was met with something he didn’t expect. Some bones belonged to super-mutant hounds, a few larger bones belonged to super mutants, but he couldn’t find any trace of human bones or even Falin’s equipment. This thing wasn’t the monster that killed his sister.
[fallout spice of life] A plentiful dinner with Charon
Entirely too healthy for Charon’s taste. Ahzrukhal only give him greasy sloppy mole rat every day. Or at least it seemed like every day.
In the Vault, synthetic jello was used extensively. Lovelock remembers having to eat green jello with nothing but cabbage in it, that his dad would bring home from the Vault’s cafeteria. The head of Hydroponics Department even suggested putting leftover bits of vegetables and mushroom from Sunday dinner into a jello mold, made with one of their vegetable flavors, for Monday! Some of the food was pretty gruesome, but he has never tasted anything to compare with the chickpea salad sandwich of Vault 101. Lovelock was actually very fortunate to have the food he did.
In which the Floke family and Namari make their way back to the surface.
The Cafe Da Matteo is a location featured in artwork by @Bonesmarinated on Tumblr:
https://bonesmarinated.tumblr.com/post/616493310771658752/fallout-spice-of-life-a-plentiful-dinner-with
I figured it would be fun to have it feature in this story.
The air in the residency hissed with electric energy. The Tansus were wasteland-rich and thrived off of the trade agreements with the New Commonwealth Provisional Government back east. This meant they were among the few to own a transporter relay in the safety of their home.
The Tansus, their adopted children, and Namari appeared in the living room of their wasteland manor in a burst of blue electricity.
Namari, however, had only traveled via molecular relay once Falin sprung it on the party. Her footsteps were unsteady as she tried to make for the door outside, but the room around her spun and twisted. She dropped to her knees and began to dry heave.
She heard something along the lines of “Take her to the guest room.”
She was scooped up by Kiki who in the moment seemed a lot taller. Taller still than normal. Namari, in her state of unease, saw her as being an angel, carrying her off to the afterlife.
---
This left Mister Tansu to his real job on the island of Melini. He had to parlay with the mayor. The mayor’s house was located on the northern end of the island. A fortified structure made up of pieces of a yacht.
As Mister Tansu and his wife stepped up to it, they fell under the shadow of the wasteland mansion.
“I swear this place is more ostentatious with every visit,” said Mister Tansu. “Before they started looting the ruins in the caves, there wasn’t so much as a single servant here.”
“The settlement’s been prosperous, dear,” said Mrs. Tansu. “Surely this is a good thing.”
“The settlement is a glutton,” said Mister Tansu. “It can’t help but to become swollen like a tick…I hope we’re long gone by the time it finally bursts.”
“Floke!” called out the mayor, who road up on a slepnir. “I’m glad you’ve returned safely. Please, follow me upstairs. I can have the boys whip us up something to munch on for dinner.”
The mayor was a mustachioed gentleman. A completely unmutated human dressed in an old black suit with the only thing highlighting himself was a moth-eaten captain’s hat that he found in the yacht that would become his home. He ate dinner on the renovated deck of the ship, exposed to the heat of the sun, which gave him a slight sunkissed complexion.
Dinner was a simple affair: bread, cured brahmin belly, mutfruit jam, and eggs. It was dense, sugary, and greasy as all get out.
Tansu sat adjacent to the mayor at the table and laid out a book of his findings on the table.
“How is the cave these days, Floke?” asked the mayor as he draped slices of the brahmin belly over the jam-slicked roll of bread.
“Drab and dank. The place has been practically scraped clean from levels one to three,” explained Tansu. “Raider hideouts are becoming more of an issue, and Super-Mutants are appearing as far up as level 3 and causing trouble.”
The mayor made a dismissive noise. “How on Earth are they getting in?”
“I’ve speculated that they’ve entered through old mining tunnels on the mainland. Something that goes beneath the lake…If you’re looking for suggestions on what to do about it. We could invest some serious caps into the local militia’s armaments and send them down to deal with the brutes.”
“It’s a novel idea, Floke,” said the Mayor after taking the tiniest bites of his food. “The NCR has sent me a letter claiming that they have ownership of the ruins within the cave. Some nonsense about the descendants of the former residents of The Town, still being alive or some such brahminshit.”
“The audacity!” shouted Tansu before slamming his hand against the table. “Don’t give them an inch, or they’ll take the whole island.”
“I don’t intend to let them, Floke,” said the mayor. “To do that would mean me coming under their banner and limiting my power over the area. But…part of me does wonder what is it down there that they want? Do you have any ideas, Floke?”
Tansu opened up the journal and showed the mayor exactly what he had been looking for when he was down in the depths. It was code. Lines and lines of computer code like the sort of thing you’d find in a busted terminal.
“It’s graffitied on the walls of various structures on the third and forth level. Some of it’s complete garbage, but I’ve had a synth go over it, and he said that it’s very strong code, despite being unable to tell me what the purpose of it is.”
“Could the Californians be after that?” asked the Mayor.
“It’s a strong possibility,” said Tansu.
---
Narmi woke up in a warm bed. It wasn’t the kind of straw or stained pre-war mattresses that she was used to from the inns and communal homes of the island or Kahka Brud. The mattress she slept on was soft and luscious, and she felt as though her dense body might sink into it.
“You’re awake,” said Kiki coming in with a dented kettle. Steam was flowing out of the mouth of it.
“Yeah, I’m not built for teleportation,” she said, punctuating her statement with a hearty laugh.
“But you’re feeling well, right?” she asked.
She produced a collapsible tin cup and sat it on the table beside Namari. She poured the steaming liquid into it. It smelled strong and festive.
“Ginger tea,” explained Kiki. “For your stomach.”
Ginger Tea
1 ginger root, finely ground
1 can of purified water (boiled)
Serves 3
+25 hp
- 1 hunger
Namari took the cup, which burned her hand, and began to sip her tea. The warm liquid did make her feel slightly better. When she was finished with her glass, Kiki took a seat next to her on the bed and offered her a small sack, jingling with the sweet sound of bottlecaps.
Namari weighed the payment in her hand. “It feels a little heavier than it should. Isn’t it a bit much?”
“Think of it as a retainer for services,” said Kiki with a wink.
“Thanks a lot,” said Namari. “I appreciate it.”
“Need a guide around town?” asked Kiki.
Indeed, she did. Namari was accompanied into town by the twins. Kiki and Kaka walked behind her dressed in their plain clothes a stitched pre-war dress for Kiki and a starched white button up shirt, slacks, and vest for Kaka. Truly, the best dressed set of twins in the wasteland.
“Do you have a home here or are you staying at a common house?” asked Kiki as they followed her through the winding streets of Melini.
“Actually,” said Namari. “I’m not heading back to my place just yet. I want to head to the cave entrance.”
“You want to head down again?” asked Kaka, concern heavy in his sonorous voice.
“Nah, nah,” said Namari. “I just have some business to take care of at the local church.”
There was a church, a sprawling temple cut into the hill that rested beside the cave. The way that the padre there tells it, every brick was taken from an existing church that rested somewhere in old Arizona. Something called the St. Mary’s church, but Namari couldn’t answer with accuracy if that was it. All she knew was that it was big, and they had one special service that they offered to prospectors in the depths of the cave.
The Padre was a scrawny ghoul living in the church’s basement. Behind him were rows after rows of bodies kept in rudimentary coffins. The air was thick with the smell of death because the man was unable to properly embalm them.
“Heya, Namari, how’s it shaking?” asked the Padre.
“I was wondering if a body came in. I’m looking to put in a claim for burial. White woman…maybe early 20s,” said Namari.
“Laios’s sister, right? Falin?” asked The Padre. “I’m sorry, but nobody’s brought up a corpse that matches her description.
“Right then,” said Namari. “Could you keep me posted? They’ve been down there looking for her for a week now, and I want to make sure they aren’t doing it in vain.”
“Toppers,” said The Padre. “But that’s going to cost you some caps.”
Kiki and Kaka watched the whole thing play out with wide, horrorstruck eyes.
“You two have never been here before, have you?” asked Namari as she caught them staring.
“Never,” said Kaka. “We’re fairly competent at crawling through the wastes; besides, we have the old man to care for us.”
They ventured out of the church and up to a dining hall- the Cafè Da Matteo. Waitresses immediately approached the table, with one of them lovingly slapping Namari on one of her broad shoulders.
“Namari, how’s it hanging? I see you finally dropped Laios’s gang. Who are the string beans you’re hanging with now?” she spouted.
The other waitress, a woman around Namari’s height, leaned over and not so subtly said to her, “You always had a thing for long legs, huh?”
The battle-hardened Namari began blushing like a Mormon bride on her wedding day. She gritted her teeth and began to order, “Three glasses of arrack and maybe some bighorner wraps…If you please.”
She put forward her caps to pay for the meal, and when the waitstaff left, she relaxed, and color vanished from her face, allowing her to become more professional. That’s what she was, goddamn it, a professional. Professionals didn’t get flustered.
“You two seem a little green,” said Namari. “But you can’t let things like the wastes desensitize you to death. I’ve heard of places out east where things like death are temporary setbacks, but that isn’t the case here. Everything outside of this island and even within it wants to eat you, so you mustn’t be glib about things like death. That’s why it’s important to visit the corpsefishers.”
“Namari, how old are you?” asked Kiki.
“Were you even listening to what I said!” she shouted.
“Well,” began Kiki. “If we wanted to find your corpse from the corpsefishers, how would we describe you to him?”
Namari needed to take a pause and consider that, but she answered, “I’m twenty-six.”
“We’re twenty,” the twins said in unison, which was kind of scary.
“The old man is 210,” said Kiki.
“And Mrs. Tansu is 204,” explained Kaka.
“I didn’t know trogs lived that long,” said Namari.
“They do, provided nothing kills them. They gradually regain human intelligence and beyond,” said Kaka. “It’s the reason why Tansu’s such an effective spymaster for the mayor.”
“How did you two come to live with them?” asked Namari.
The two twins looked from one another, then back to Namar,i with Kiki breaking the ice, “It’s a bit of a long story. We were orphans from a settlement further north of here-”
She was cut off by the waitress reappearing with more arrack and steaming hot food for the trio.
Namari stood on her chair and spooned generous helpings of the food onto handmade corn tortillas for the pair. The ground meat smelled strongly of wasteland spices, such as jalapeno, as well as locally grown ingredients like red pepper.
“Let me know if you want anything more,” said Namari. “There’s plenty of time for stories. It is our day off, after all.”
