From the Causeway to Washington DC, Thursday Afternoon

[arboreal_priestess]

This was not the first time on Fandom that Verity had been glad her apartment could double as an armory, but it might have been the most acute. This week had been ridiculous, from fighting off a radroach invasion in their kitchen to the heart attack that had been discovering that the colony of Aeslin mice had been replaced by a colony of Aeslin mole-rats.

Nightmare fuel was walking into a room of giant mole-rats and hearing them talk to you, in case anybody needed a shot of that real quick. (Nobody needed a shot of that. Nobody.)

They also ate a lot more than Aeslin mice normally did and even though they supplemented their diet by eating pretty much any other creature they could find, the food levels in the Kincaid-Price household had gone from 'dangerously low' to 'practically non-existant' over night.

Which was why Liam and Verity had decided to strap on pretty much every single weapon they owned and head into the Wasteland to scavenge the remains of D.C. Supposedly, that was where the best remaining supplies were located.

Supposedly, that was where the most dangerous predators in the Wasteland were located, too. And most of them walked on two legs.

That was a problem they'd deal with when they got to it.

"All right," Verity said, securing another rusty container of bobby pins and her spare screwdriver. "We ready to head out?"

[Open to anyone who wants to join Liam and Verity on a scavenging expedition. Be prepared to self-NPC!]

Comments

[arboreal_priestess]

"What do you think's gonna be down there?" Verity asked. "With no Taelons to resist..."

[firstofitskind]

"Maybe something like the school, on a smaller scale?" Liam said. "Seems like people were pretty paranoid." To be fair, they'd obviously had a right to be.

[arboreal_priestess]

"One of those Vault things?" Verity asked. "Maybe. And maybe that means food to trade for."

Verity had plenty of ammo, after all, and that seemed to spend almost as well as bottlecaps out here.

[firstofitskind]

The elevator door slid open, revealing a cave system much like the one in Liam's reality.

Unlike the Lair, instead of high tech computer systems, comfortable couches, and priceless art, this place had a row of those old-fashioned-looking terminals along one wall, and the rest were lined with shelves upon shelves of all sorts of supplies: ammunition, food... the only thing missing were the medical supplies like RadX and RadAway, but Liam suspected if they went further into the not-Lair, they'd find something like the infirmary.

[arboreal_priestess]

"Perfect," Verity said, but didn't move. This seemed a little too easy to get to. One hacked terminal and suddenly they were in a supply depot?

Not likely.

"One second," she said, and tossed in one of her bounce balls, the kind she'd used when they'd first ended up in the tunnels with the servitors. The ball bounced once, twice...and then was blown out of the air by twin turrets.

[firstofitskind]

"If you're paranoid enough to build yourself a fancy bomb shelter, you'd make sure it had a decent security system," Liam acknowledged, taking careful aim at the spot the laser beams had originated from and firing off two quick shots in succession.

[arboreal_priestess]

Verity was about to respond, but another voice cut her off. "Who's ready to have their ass kicked?!" the voice demanded as a bright yellow eye appeared in the darkness beyond this first room.

"Okay, this is weird," Verity muttered.

[firstofitskind]

“Seconding,” Liam replied. “Getting our asses kicked was absolutely not part of today’s plan, right?”

[arboreal_priestess]

The voice resolved itself into a robot, floating several feet in the air; it had three of those glowing eye stalks and three dangling arms: one with a pincer, one with a flame-thrower, and one with some kind of futuristic gun. "You better run, you commie-loving bastards!" it yelled, voice like a Hollywood drill sergeant.

"I can't even," Verity said, and shot the thing twice. Both bullets ricocheted off its armor. "Well, fuck."

[firstofitskind]

Maybe an energy- sorry, laser pistol would work better?

Liam fired off a couple of blasts, aiming for the fun that looked like... well, like a nicer version of what his normal weapon had been turned into thanks to this week's weirdness.

[arboreal_priestess]

The arm holding that weapon was armored but the weapon itself wasn't. It exploded in the robot's...hand?...sending it reeling to the side.

Which gave Verity an excellent idea. She waited for it to stop moving, tracking the flame-thrower as it raised it to return fire.

Steady...steady... If she didn't get this right, this was going to hurt like hell.

The flame-thrower stopped moving. "There's nothing better than the smell of fresh plasma--" it began.

Verity's bullet slammed into the nozzle of the flame-thrower and a gout of flames whooshed backwards over the unit.

[firstofitskind]

“Nice work,” Liam said approvingly, keeping his gun trained on it just in case being on fire wasn’t enough to take it out of commission.

[arboreal_priestess]

"Unit deactivating. This troop is hitting the rack!" came a sputtering voice from inside the unit before it went dark and crashed to the floor.

Only then did Verity let her gun drop, too. "This place is just a barrel of laughs," she said wryly.

[firstofitskind]

Liam walked over to it slowly, reaching out with one foot to nudge it tentatively. Nothing.

"At least the mutated animals don't spout canned catchphrases?" he offered.

[arboreal_priestess]

"And are edible," Verity added. "If only on a technicality."

She looked around. "Any more security measures you think?"

[firstofitskind]

"The infirmary'll have something, I'll bet," Liam said, leaning down to scrounge through the burned-out robot parts for anything useful, like power cells for his own laser pistol. "But whoever armed this place probably figured that'd keep out most of the riff-raff." Yes, he just used the phrase 'riff-raff'. Shut up.

"You know who'd love this?" he asked, standing back up after he'd tucked away everything useful he could pick off the remains of the sentry robot. "Your sister." So many traps!

[arboreal_priestess]

"Which just goes to prove that this place is ridiculous and wrong," Verity declared. "Antimony is not a good metric for enjoyable things."

Beat.

"...No but did you seriously just use the term 'riff-raff'?"

IT MERITED ASKING.

[firstofitskind]

"... Yes?" Liam blinked at her. "Whoever stocked this place," and armed it, "would definitely refer to us as 'riff-raff'." That was his logic and he was sticking to it!

[arboreal_priestess]

Uh-huh.

"I'm pretty sure I generally count as riff-raff anyway," Verity said.

Alex wasn't. Sarah definitely wasn't. Antimony most assuredly was.

[firstofitskind]

"You do," Liam said cheerfully. "But you're in good company, at least."

[arboreal_priestess]

"Nah, you're not riff-raff," Verity said, gently knocking her hip into his. "You're respectable."

[firstofitskind]

"That," Liam said dryly, "depends entirely on who you ask."

[arboreal_priestess]

"Anybody on the island," Verity said. "And a handful of people off."

You know. People's whose opinions she gave a fuck about.

[firstofitskind]

By pure serendipity, most of the people from Liam's world who would've balked at the concept of him being 'respectable' were long dead.

"Oh?" he asked, amused. "You do a survey?"

[arboreal_priestess]

"Oh, you weren't there for that?" Verity asked. "Yeah. Around the same time I took a vote on which sheriff had the best ass."