Deathclaw Troubles

Forbidden Knowledge:

[X] Acquire Noah’s Key.

[ ] Wait for Extraction.

"Goddamn it," I cursed after cutting the top of the unlabeled tin can and finding beans. You would have expected that the might and powerful Enclave would have supplied its soldiers with something better than the exact same mushy, rancid, tasteless beans I had been eating in the cafeterias as a common citizen since the day I was born.

I took a spoonful of beans and checked my Pip-Boy again to distract me from the sour flavor. The orders remained unchanged, I was to stay put and wait for extraction, but that order had been sent before most of my gear had been either destroyed by a crazed vault dweller or dragged down a river. A quick check of the inventory showed I was out of ammo in my plasma rifle and on the last clip for my plasma pistol, the power armor was in terrible shape, but I still had a pair of fusion cores with almost full charge. No Stimpaks, no Rad-X, no Mentats. Even those odious beans were coming to an end, there were only two more cans and then I would be starving.

I cursed the bitch from Vault 97 with a loud groan.

The mission had everything to be a piece of cake, the eggheads in Intelligence had uncovered some intel about valuable pre-war tech locked inside of Vault 97, so me and my squadron were dispatched to retrieve it and annex the Vault. We did it by the book, hailed the Overseer using old Vault-tech codes, as soon as they knew we were agents of the US government they invited us in, had a whole welcoming party set up even.

[Enclave Officer] We eliminated all the adults and rounded up the kids to be sent to the reeducation camps, the lucky brats would have the chance to grow up as sub-citizens of the Enclave and help us rebuild the future. All by the book, Vault Dwellers rarely cause problems. Breaching through the workshops and the laboratories was harder, but nothing a PCF-38 Overcharged Plasma Rifle couldn’t vaporize, their small caliber firearms couldn’t do more than scratch the paint of our X-02 Power Armor.

I dispatched a team to take the kids back to Raven Rock, while I moved deeper into the Vault with my personal squad to secure our priority targets. The standard Vault architecture don’t offer many good places to mount a defense, but the Dwellers tried anyway. We located the asset deep into their laboratories, the small suitcase barely looked worth it, but if the nerds in Intelligence wanted something, it’s not my place to ask questions, just to retrieve it with a good dose of US-grade Shock-and-Awe.

Then the blonde bitch killed Smith. He was pacifying the living quarters, when he found her in one of the rooms, he notified us via the radio, got ready to vaporize her and then… Then the bitch killed him. I can still hear his screams coming through the radio, he was burned alive inside of his power armor by some kind of microwave gun the likes I had never seen before.

That’s when I decided to send the book to hell, we should have retreated to secure the asset, but I wanted that bitch dead. We regrouped in the main Atrium and separated in three-man kill teams, moving tightly as we sweep the Vault room by room, hunting her down and eliminating any survivors we found along the way.

Adam, Charlie, Jacob, Steve, Kyle, Aron, Luke, Jack, Ryan, Tristan… I remember each of their deaths, the screams coming trough the radio as she killed us one by one. She lured us into traps, vaporized us with our own weapons, and blew us up with improvised explosives. She was a heartless, cold killer.

We faced off in the hydroponics sector. As we swept the room, she emerged out of an algae vat like some kind of ancient demon coming out of the depths, brandishing an auto-axe that cut through John’s armor. I still can heart that horrible grinding sound of the metal being brutally open and then the wet crunch as the blades cut into his flesh, the spray of blood that erupted through the cracks in his armor bathing her in bright red.

She came at me next, swinging the auto-axe at my head, but I parried it with my left hand, the blade wrecked the fingers of the power armor, but gladly my own hand was spared. Before I could even react, she cracked the chest of my armor open, cutting through the metal, the frame underneath it, and then the screeching sting of pain when the blades cut through my uniform and my skin.

If it hadn’t been for Gregor tackling her, she would have killed me right there. I shouldn’t have left him behind, but he begged me to go ahead, I needed to keep the Noah’s key safe or their deaths would have been in vain. She plunged the auto-axe deep against his leg and he pulled the pin on the plasma grenade.

The heat of the explosion chased me down the corridor as I moved as fast as I could through the grey corridors of the Vault, I told myself she couldn’t have survived the plasma, but some primitive part in my brain insisted she was still alive and at any moment she would come for me.

I had never been happier than when I embarked on the Vertibird, that should have been the end of it. The engines roaring around me were the comforting sound of going back home, of being high and above the Wasteland and its barbaric inhabitants.

We were engulfed in the nuclear rage of an airburst mini nuke, the manifestation of fire and fury that obliterated everything in its path, my armor screamed with alerts as the sudden spike in radiation and heat overwhelmed its systems. Nuclear fire wrecked the Vertibird, plunged out of the air and into the cold waters of the river below us.

I lost conscience at some point, the automated systems kicking into action to preserve my life, spending the last of my medical resources as the powerful currents of the river dragged me south, deep into the Southern Badlands. I don’t know precisely how long I was in the river, but I managed to drag myself out of the water and into the ruins of an old hotel.

I was bleeding, irradiated, almost drowned, and had lost most of my gear, but I fucking survived and kept this dammed Noah’s Key with me.

I set up a provisory camp near the hotel’s pool where I could be easily spotted by any passing vertibird, but not by any Wastelander coming down the road in front of the hotel. We had sent a signal to Raven Rock that we were inbound with the package, so when we failed to make contact again, they would send some sort of rescue for me. I had faith in Enclave and Eden’s plans for America.

[Hunger Increased]

[Thirsty Increased]

---

Day 2:

Forbidden Knowledge:

[X] Acquire Noah’s Key.

[ ] Wait for Extraction.

Eating the last can of beans today, still no signal of the Enclave or anyone else for good measure.

[Survival 30] Turns out this whole surviving stuff is way more complicated than I expected, I tried to get a fire going like they taught us in the survival course, but rubbing two sticks together did nothing.

[Science 75] Luck for me, I managed to use the vestigial charge in a spent microfusion cell to make a sparkle and start a small fire. So at least I’m not freezing to death now.

Eating the last can of beans for dinner I realize that if rescue don’t come by tonight, tomorrow I’ll have to search the hotel for supplies like some common Scavenger. I hope there’s some food in the kitchen, otherwise my only options will be to go hunting, or even batter with the primitives.

[Enclave Officer] The Southern Badlands were savage country, Enclave Intelligence showed no presence of either the NCR or the Brotherhood anywhere near, they had tagged a dozen different nomad tribes deeply infected by mutants, and a couple of small settlements where overgrown raiders played at being warlords.

Any real danger in the region came out of the wildlife; you had the usual geckos, but also some pretty vicious coywolves, and a nest of deathclaws in an old trains station. Lucky for me, there were also some big herds of Brahmin moving through the region.

It wasn’t a bad place, with my power armor still working I could move around undisturbed, even a deathclaw couldn’t bring me down, but without my rifle working and my pistol on its last charges it meant I wouldn’t have the firepower to properly pacify these savages if the need arise.

With some luck, all of this would be just mere speculation, the distress signal from our Vertbird must have reached the Raven Rock, a rescue party must be coming to me at any moment, I just need to stay strong, hold my position, ad trust on Enclave.

Searching the radio waves with the Pip-Boy was useless, there’s a couple of garbled signals and nothing more, not even one of those annoying DJ’s that set themselves up everywhere. Whatever the locals around here have been doing, they haven’t been sending radio messages.

However, fiddling with my Pip-Boy also revealed another problem to my ever-growing list. My radiation levels are growing, slowly but constantly. This is just… Fucking great! They had warned us about staying outside without Rad-X, but I had never expected it would be so bad.

[Light Radiation Sickness]

[Light Starvation]

[Light Dehydration]** **

---

Day 3:

Forbidden Knowledge:

[X] Acquire Noah’s Key.

[ ] Wait for Extraction.

[Survival 50] Fuck hunting.

Hunting turned out to be much harder than it seemed on the educational videos, the first thing I learned was that I would have to leave the power armor behind, it scared any prey around and attracted predators and savages. The second thing I learned is that a plasma pistol is not designed for hunting, it has the bad habit of vaporizing the target, leaving behind at most some pieces of charred meat and at worst a pile of dust.

So, dinner tonight is going to be… Unidentifiable, charred remains of a Brahmin.

I searched the ruins of the hotel, it shouldn’t have been hard after all those primitive Wastelanders had been surviving like this for centuries, but whoever had occupied it had bugged out long ago and taken everything of value with them. The rests of campfires, graffiti, and the bones of humans, animal, and others showed there had been successive waves of habitation. The walls told a long story of gunfights and violence, spent ammo of several calibers on the floor were a signal that this place had been intensely disputed over the years.

The good news is that I found some bottles of water inside the hotel, the Pip-Boy says it’s dirty, but right now I’m more worried about dying of thirsty than of radiation poisoning. Their kitchen was completely empty, not even some wild ghouls moving around as I had expected.

I need to start considering the Enclave never received my signal, I simply don’t have the resources to hold this position for much longer. One of the things I found while scavenging the hotel was a map of local attractions and it included a small radio station, if I can make it there then I could use the bigger antenna to send a signal to Enclave confirming my location and that I have the Noah’s key with me. The problem is that the station is near the deathclaw’s nest.

Tomorrow I’ll move in before dawn in my power armor.

---

Day 4:

Forbidden Knowledge:

[X] Acquire Noah’s Key.

[ ] Wait for Extraction.

[Heavy Duty] Being inside the power armor again was comforting, the weight of the titanium alloy armor plate surrounding me, the strength of the pneumatic muscles reacting to my every move. Even damaged this armor made me the most powerful creature in the region.

With my two fusion cores still fully charged I can move through the area quickly, moving away from the hotel following the roads for a while, fortunately not finding savages on the way, but everywhere I could see signs of their passage through the area. For most of the morning, I followed the road moving south until I reached the borders of the collapsed city of San Marino, having to go down through the sewers to find a passage amidst the collapsed buildings.

For a while, I heard the sounds of explosions coming from the surface, the natives playing at warfare probably. It didn’t matter, I kept following the old sewer tunnels until I emerged on an open plaza, the radio station just in front of me.

A deathclaw just behind me.

The beast pounced me before I had time to perceive it; the claws cut through the armor plates and only luckily missed my flesh. I discharged my plasma pistol, the last and precious shots burning the creature’s thick leather, but doing little to slow it down.

I punched, kicked, and even tried stabbing it with a piece of rebar, but I simply couldn’t kill it. The wounds closed in front of my eyes, while its claws cutting through my armor, breaking pieces off.

In a desperate bid, I overloaded my fusion core and ejected it, the superheated plasma finally hurting the beast enough to slow it down, with no other chance I had to do the same with my second core, sacrificing it to finally bring it down.

The radio station, if it even qualified to be called that, had been broken by time and gutted by scavengers. As I moved out of my power armor to inspect the electronics of the room a cold wind whistled through holes in the walls. The sky above was gray, bruised and pregnant with rain. The transmitter was in a terrible shape, scavengers had taken everything that looked valuable and black blast streaks around one panel showed that someone had tried to disable it with explosives and failed.

[Repair 50] Jury-rigging what remained to send a simple Morse signal in intervals of a minute was easy, if the Enclave was out there, they would be sure to find it and come looking for me.

That’s when I found the corpse.

[Medicine 35] It was the body of a woman dressed in some strange kind of Kevlar armor. My only education in medicine was in the matters of first aid, but even for me it was evident there was something wrong with her. Her body had resisted the ravages of decomposition, you could imagine she had just been killed. Her wounds, two gun shots to the chest, were too clean and I could swear there were metallic filaments enlaced around her bones where those appeared. If she was some kind of mutant, it was one I had never seen before, but what scared me the most was the idea she could have been created.

In her hand she had a duffel bag, white and surprisingly clean. There were no words on the outside, but only a large bar code. I had to break her hand to get the bag free.

I opened it, driven by curiosity and necessity, hoping there would be rations or even an working radio inside, but instead there were only strange pieces of armor made with some non-metallic alloy that I had never encountered before, a sword that looked in good enough condition that I could batter it with the locals if things got too bad.

I stuffed whatever else of value I could find around the station, later the Eggheads in Intelligence could have all the fun examining these things while I enjoyed some well-deserved R&R in one of the Enclave controlled islands.

On the way out, I used the sword to cut some slabs of deathclaw meat and even some of the leather. After all these troubles the least I could do was eat some decent steaks for dinner. The last thing I did was to cut out the hand, back in Raven Rock I would have it turned into a trophy.

The way back was a slow, trudge through the swamps, using the main roads would have been too risky in my condition. With my power armor completely wrecked and running on the emergency power even a tribe of primitives could take me down now.

Finally, back in my camp I drunk some of the dirty water and threw some wood on the fire, awakening the flames until they were hot enough to cook those slabs of Deathclaw meat I had kept with me.

[Lockpick 35] While the meat cooked, it took a good twenty minutes of tinkering with the mechanical guts to get the briefcase of the Noah’s key open; if I was going to die for this thing then I might as well get a look at the dammed thing.

The device was a small, cylindrical attachment for the Pip-boy, eight of them carefully arranged inside of the briefcase, still shinning as the day they had been made. Each one was a couple of inches long, with the last inch made out of some transparent alloy, inside of it I could see small silvery disks floating in some transparent solution.

Out of pure curiosity, I attached the device to my pip-boy and… nothing happened. Dammed thing must have broken down by itself after all these years in storage.

Fuck. Just great, all those deaths and this fucking fuck don’t even work anymore.

I chew on the Deathclaw meat trying to ignore the pressure building up in the back of my head and the unfathomable desperation threatening to take over.

Tomorrow I will look for more food.

New Perk Gained: Deathclaw Slayer

New Perk Gained: Rad-Skin

---

Day 6:

Forbidden Knowledge:

[X] Acquire Noah’s Key.

[ ] Wait for Extraction.

Is the Enclave even coming anymore? What if something really bad happened at Raven Rock?

[Survival 50] The storm caught me by surprise, a savage thunderstorm that darkened the skies, the lightning cutting through the ink-black clouds with thunder growling and crackling above me. It fell with such power that I had to abandon my makeshift camp and look for shelter inside the hotel; it took less than twenty minutes for the water to wash away all that I had.

At least the rain worked well to quench my thirsty, I drunk my fill and filled a couple of old bottles that had been lying around. I ate the last of the deathclaw meat raw, I couldn’t find any way to make a fire and my hunger been too strident for me to resist, the first bite was supposed to be disgusting, but somehow the fresh taste of raw meat and blood filled me with energy. I devoured it, ripping the flesh with teeth and fingers, even sucking on the bones for the precious marrow.

This wasn’t the behavior of an Enclave officer, but I couldn’t stop myself, the first bite was like dropping into a spiral of hunger, dragged downwards faster and faster.

After dinner, I slept heavily. Even having done little for most of the day, my body felt exhausted, pained in many places. I try not to think of the symptoms of hunger and radiation, but my mind kept conjuring images from our survival course, all the ways the Wasteland could kills us, all the ways in which we were weak. I wanted to be inside of my power armor once again, just climb inside and have its armored plates surrounding me.

At some point, I started to dream, a feverish surge of colors and sensations that my brain struggled to make sense.

It was night, but too bright, too clear.

I hit the ground running. My bare feet touched wet ground as I raced toward a distant tower of flames. I knew it wasn't my own body that carried me. Too light, too quick, too strong. It filled me with raw power and speed.

Effortlessly I dashed towards a crude defensive wall of thin, sharpened logs secured against a wall of pressed earth and junk metal. I jumped over it with barely a thought and landed amidst a small settlement. I had never been there before, but had seen many outposts just like it, clinging for life at the edges of the Wasteland. Built over the ruins of some old-world town, hastily repaired and modified with pieces of scavenged metal and green wood, much of it was now in flames.

All around me the humid darkness echoed with animal shrieks of pleasure and human cries of pain. The air was saturated with an exasperating perfume: the metallic, sweet scent of freshly spilled blood.

All around me, I heard the almost purring sound of my kin as they found fresh prey, the roaring challenges, and the smell of affinity.

The smell was strange, particular, entrancing. Trapped in this abominable body, I recognized my kin by their distinctive scent they left behind, knew their emotions and desires.

I was gasping with the intensity of the excitement, these simple and overwhelming emotions. Heat radiated from my very core, surging through my limbs and my face. It was the heat of desire, of an unquenchable hunger. The heat propelled me forward, through the streets of broken asphalt and towards the center of the settlement where an old church stood and from where human’s screams came.

The heat grew, seemed to compress my lungs in chains of steel, forcing me to breathe in ravenously for air. And from my own throat came a powerful roar. The vibrations resonated over my skin like a caress of power.

I turned slowly, taking in every detail of the grim scene: Fire illuminated the night spreading through the buildings with unending hunger, the growl of hunting rifles and the hiss of laser muskets resonated and mixed with the screams of humans.

A scorching blast of laser fire hit me, humans inside the church with laser muskets mounting a last, desperate defense. Standing still against the flames I was an easy target, but as soon as I dropped on all fours and begun running, they couldn’t track me anymore, my long tail swishing behind me to give me stability.

I crossed the courtyard, homing in on the shooter on the top of the church with easy, powerful steps.

Steel plates barred the main doors. Without a thought my claws came out, I climbed the church's front wall, as quick as a lizard, scampering up onto the roof. The two shooters on the roof had no chance; I dropped on them like a force of nature, the unbridled wrath of nuclear devastation given form. My claws cut trough their leather long coats, broke their laser muskets, and wrecked their flesh and bone.

I dropped fifteen meters, landing softly in front of the church and roared deliciously, the power reverberating all over my body.

Only one creature remained standing.

Armored and armed he wore an T-45 power armor, a tall and powerfully built man walked towards me, mechanical muscles straining to hold the added weight of a minigun in his hands. The armored enemy braced himself as he lowered the minigun towards me and spun is barrels, I savagely dodged out of the way before it shot.

He followed my movements with a stream of destruction, the bullets wrecking everything they touched, but even his mechanically enhanced reflexes were too slow to catch me running.

In a single, catlike pounce, I crossed the space between us. Launched myself with arms outstretched, and when I slammed onto the enemy, caught hold and drove my claws into his armor. With a combination of balance and strength, the man managed to keep his feet despite the sudden impact. My claws whipped in a blur, tearing at the broad shoulders. Metal gave way, presenting me with bare, warm skin.

The man screamed and whirled, punching, kicking, throwing me into the ground. He unsheathed a large machete and readied himself to face me. The helmet came out, the systems broken and four large gashes where my claws cut it.

A surge of righteous wrath coursed through my blood. Under the wrath—and more terrible than it—there was pure delight in the destruction of the enemy.

The man was dark-haired; eyes were blue and full of hate. He smelled of ice and regrets.

We met with a thunderous strike, the machete cut deep into my body, the mechanical muscles giving it the strength to cut through my leather and bit into my flesh, but my abominable metabolism reacted with frightening speed, silencing the pain and fueling my rage. My claws pierced the metal, reached what was soft and tender inside of it.

Taking his still hot heart in my claws and devouring it, I roared aloud my victory.

I awakened on my hands and knees on the hotel floor, the water stained walls closed around me, the world screamed with thundering staccato. My mind reeled to understand reality once more, to banish the abomination’s dreams.

That was only a dream, some disturbed vision brought by radiation or some other crap in the food.

I can’t wait anymore, tomorrow I need to look for help.

Forbidden Knowledge has failed.

New Quest: Claws Out

New Quest: Tourist Trap

New Perk: Friend of the Night