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?**
"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.
"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."
**Reasonable question, Corporal.** I reach up with my right hand and brush some of the accumulated dust off my visor. I can navigate reasonably 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?"
Hm. **Aside from Sergeant Dornan, did any of you ever meet
Special Agent Frank Horrigan.**
"Uh, who?"
"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.**
"He was a-? Wastelander?"
**He was a Super Mutant.**
"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.**
"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."
**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-.**
"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.**
"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.**
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..?"
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-."
I
shove my hands together, the lump shattering and spraying dust and shards of concrete out like a fragmentation grenade!
"Whow!"
**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?"
"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."
"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?"
**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."
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.
**Sergeant, I have a question.**
**Good for you, mutie. I bet it's a real nice one, too.**
**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.**
**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.**
I nod. **True. Though you-.**
"Hey, Mutie Chief?"
**Yes?**
"Can you do something about the dust? It's messing up my V.A.T.S. system."
**Sergeant?**
**It would be useful if we can see where we're going.**
**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.
**Bett-?**
Yellow lights appear in the distance-.
**
Cover!**