Chojin Patriarch
Veteran Lurker
Ah, Krono. Out looking for the Battle-Bots, are we? I suppose the Ohio Colony pushed for it, given they're a clear danger, and have useful tech they can recover. Getting in touch with their maker is probably a bonus objective.5th November 2282
09:24 CDT
"Hey, Mutie Chief?"
**If you want my attention, corporal, you can just think hard.** I glance at the man marching along behind me wearing the Mark One Advanced Power Armour. **You can think, right?**
Especially if he's got any obvious 'not pure human' traits, like altered skin, bigger muscles or giant throbbing skill veins (because psychic.)"Yeah, cause you got crazy mutie magic, right?"
There's a degree of nervousness in his voice. I suppose that after a lifetime of being told that wastelanders are a different breed of human, it's a little unsettling to meet one who effectively is.
Ah, the Sarge. Still in fine voice, I see."ARE YOU BREAKING COMMUNICATIONS DISCIPLINE FOR A REASON, CORPORAL, OR ARE YOU MERELY TRYING TO MAKE ME ANGRY ENOUGH TO HAVE A BRAIN HEMORRHAGE?"
"Ah, Sergeant, I was wanting to ask how long Krono can stay out in the dust without power armour. Since that might be relevant to the mission. We don't have all that much Rad-Away and we're getting closer to the impact sites."
...Not by themselves. This might actually make the sergeant pop a blood vessel...**Reasonable question, Corporal.** I reach up with my right hand and brush some of the accumulated dust off my visor. I can navigate reasonable well with my psychic abilities, and goodness knows I can't see much with my eyes in this dust cloud, but people get worried when I start walking around with no visible means of seeing my environment. **I am effectively immune to environmental radiation.**
"Psychic powers do that?"
Heh. Big lad, ain't he?Hm. **Aside from Sergeant Dornan, did any of you ever meet Special Agent Frank Horrigan.**
"Uh, who?"
Who some of the more hard-liner anti-mutant types would probably rather be forgotten."President Richardson's bodyguard. He died at The Rig. There aren't a lot of us still alive who met him."
**Come now, Sergeant. Be honest. Frank Horrigan was also an early example of the Enclave's mutant-friendly policies.**
And a real nice guy, if you didn't piss him off, too.
Yeah, pretty much the Enclave's equivalent of an Astartes, if you didn't mind the colouring."Huh?"
**And I don't mean 'a mutant who was really super', I mean two and a half metres tall, green skin filled with muscle, immune to poison, disease and radiation.**
...Let me guess: a Player Character?"That-. I don't-. S-sergeant?"
"Horrigan volunteered for some experimental medical procedures. Anything else is-. Was classified. Though since the terrorist traitor who destroyed the Rig and murdered the President wrote a book about it I don't suppose it's still classified."
A logical enough idea. Pity things went tits-up before it could be perfected.**Before the War, the United States was afflicted by a disease they called the New Plague. Various groups were working on a cure, but one team decided that rather than killing the disease directly, they'd try altering the human body so that it wasn't vulnerable to the disease. They had some positive results, reported it to their investors and… Then the US Army got involved. Because if the tailored virus they were using could make people immune to the New Plague, could it do other things? Like making them stronger? Tougher? Immune-.**
By which time, making super-soldiers took a back seat to surviving."Are you saying the Government invented super mutants?"
**Not on purpose. They were failed test subjects. And the War ended before there were any complete successes.**
Those would probably have been reserved for advanced special forces."Oh. Except you now, right?"
**Me and this guy from Los Angeles called Ton Barracus. He probably died when the Master died, but it's hard to find bodies to check after a nuclear blast. If things had gone a little differently, all American soldiers would have had abilities like mine… Minus the psychic powers.**
Now, if he could have reliably reproduced it, things might have been very different.I suppose Mister Barracus is proof of the infinite monkeys postulate. Mister Moreau tried throwing as many people as he could into the vats and he got an actual supersoldier purely by luck. I wonder if he knew what he'd done, or if he considered Ton an irrelevance beside the glorious super mutant race?
"Like..?"
A good few hundred kilograms, at least? Impressive, but doable in power armour...I look around, then spot a lump of concrete laying on the ground. It's roughly a metre long along its longest axis and about half that on its other two. I walk over to it and pick it up without much effort.
"Huh. Okay, but-."
...That, on the other hand, is not.I shove my hands together, the lump shattering and spraying dust and shards of concrete out like a fragmentation grenade!
"Whow!"
Keep in mind, you aren't bulletproof, corporal.**The pre-War government was surprisingly pro-transhuman. If it gave them an edge against the Chinese, they were all for it.**
"Where do I get something like that?"
Good answer, kid. That probably saved you from being busted back down to private."ARE YOU SAYING THAT YOU WANT TO BE A MUTANT, CORPORAL?"
"No, Sergeant! I mean, I-. The President was okay with his own bodyguard using it, and the old US government wanted to use it on the army. It's not like he got tentacles or supercancer or anything."
In other words, 'it's okay if it's our wastelander muties doing it'?"THE US GOVERNMENT OF THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY DID NOT APPROVE IT FOR USE! ARE YOU SAYING THAT A BUNCH OF MUTANT WASTELANDERS KNOW BETTER THAN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT?"
"No, no Sergeant! Unless-! I mean, if the Government did most of the work and some of the more intelligent wastelanders used Government equipment, maybe they could finish it?"
And that could be decades away. No super-soldiering for you, Corporal America.**No. Stabilising the Forced Evolutionary Virus like this required-** A power ring. An orange power ring, to be precise. I'm not exactly sure how I got even a tiny charge off the Guardian's corpse, but I'm not complaining. **-an expendable resource I can't replicate. President Anderson fried his drives before we could get hold of his research and the late President Eden was only interested in using FEV to kill super mutants and ghouls. I suspect that further FEV work will have to wait until the United States of America has been reunified.**
"Huh."
Yeah, you'd have better luck searching for a needle in a big haystack. Without a magnet or fire.The squad and I continue through the dust storm, the occasional flash of ionic lightning overhead and the lights from their armour being the only sources of illumination. We're heading south towards the former site of Cedar Rapids. If we find nothing of note there, our next stop is Des Moines. Then there's a short list of pre-War government bunkers. But-. Uh. There's no real reason why a private citizen couldn't have built their own, and if that's what happened then we won't have a record of it. We're half-hoping that checking the houses of rich pre-War citizens might result in us picking up clues, because the state is a large place to search on foot.
Still not comfortable with the head-talking, huh, Dornan?**Sergeant, I have a question.**
**Good for you, mutie. I bet it's a real nice one, too.**
And if the men in charge said do it, you do it? A good little soldier, huh?**This is narrowcast. The rest of the squad aren't hearing it. Would you mind telling me why you supported Anderson over Granite?**
**I was following President Richardson's last orders. Anderson's plan was closer to that than what Granite wanted. It was an Enclave plan.**
And if not, there's always some other plan?**That's certainly factually correct. The chance of it working didn't factor into it?**
**President Anderson was an intelligent man who knew plenty about mutie culture. I trusted his judgement. You don't know that Granite's way would have worked out any better.**
Ah, someone's spotted something?
Oh, right. Because that gameplay mechanic is an actual in-universe thing.**Yes?**
"Can you do something about the dust? It's messing up my V.A.T.S. system."
On the other hand, the dust is good cover. Unfortunately, that works both ways...**Sergeant?**
**It would be useful if we can see where we're going.**
To human eyes, at least...**Then I'll see what I can do.**
I push outwards and down, about a third of the dust being pulled to the ground. Visibility improves… A little, and from further away we shouldn't be much more visible.
...Pity the folks they're looking for aren't using human eyes to see.
Well, looks like their trail just got hot. Now, have the Battle-bots seen them coming, or is this just a chance encounter? Hopefully, the militia troops can take the heat from the enemy's beam guns, or this is going to end very messily... If delicious-smelling. If nothing else, a psychic ally's going to be a big force-multiplier...