agoodyarn | In the Wasteland

He lays in agony on the floor, Dogmeat by his side. She sits up at the other person and hurries over, showing the stranger exactly where her master lies writhing on the floor. The acid eats through his leg and he clutches at it, trying to dig out any remaining poison.

The steps are going to come faster and suddenly there's a woman there, dressed in unfamiliar clothing stowing away her gun in a holster on her hip and looking him over. It's not Vaultdweller gear, that's for certain. But neither is it the kind of thing that folks wear out in the wasteland. It looks... strangely plain, a style that's jarring here in a place with such a specific aesthetic, but it fits her. There's a glance around the room at the corpses, at the dead radscorpions, and especially at the queen and when she gets close enough to take in the gaping wound in his leg, she's reaching for a pack on her hip.

"Hey, hey, look at me, give me eye contact, buddy, okay? You're going to be all right. You're going to be all right. I'm gonna assume Big Mama over there got you?"

She perks up as she clearly finds what she was looking for and pulls out a bottle and a familiar stimpack.

"Think you can chuck this down, handsome?"

He reaches for his gun, but when she draws close, he sees what she has and the relief leaves him jittery. He reaches for the stimpack first.

"Just give me that," he snarls at her. He can't focus enough to see what's in the bottle, but he knows healing when it's right in front of him.

The objective is help him and that means no arguing over order. She'll hold out the stimpack and then put the bottle next to him where he can reach.

"Here," she says as she pulls out her gun and starts looking around to make sure that nothing takes advantage of their situation to spring on them. She's not looking at him for the moment, but there's an odd sense that if he turns into a danger, she won't necessarily hesitate.

"Bottle has an antivenom. Learned how to make it about a week ago. It's been helpful."

She winces as she spots just how many bodies are in here.

"You know what the hell happened in here or came in mid way?"

He stabs the stimpack through his thigh and lets out a shuddering breath as the relief comes almost immediately. The wound starts to knit itself back together and the pain relents to nothing more than a dull throb in the back of his mind. His pants are a lost cause, but that's easily stitched back together.

The antivenom is ignored for a moment as he pushes himself up. Instead, he focuses on the way she holds that gun, recognizes the expert stance almost immediately. He's not dealing with an amateur Vaultie.

Maybe military? The Brotherhood of Steel?

Fuckers.

"Eh, we came in after the damage was done. Legion fuckers."

She makes a face at the mention of the Legion, unimpressed and irritated at the very idea of dealing with them. But she sighs as she looks around at the carnage.

But she pauses after a moment.

"'We' being you and the dog?"

He eyes the door and then her.

"Yeah. That's right. Me and Dogmeat."

He doesn't know why he protects Lucy, but he does. He needs to, even if she might not do the same for him.

Stupid Vaultie.

"What the fuck are you doing out here?"

She tucks her sidearm away, just as professional as before, and goes into her pack again to pull out an apple. She'll hold it out to him.

"I'm looking for someone. Have been for the last few weeks." There's something to her voice that says it's been longer but 'here', at least, it's only been a few weeks. "He did me a solid a while back and I found out that he needed help. So I figured I'd try and track him down."

She pulls out an apple for herself.

"I don't suppose you've met a guy who goes by Tim Breaker?"

He declines the apple with a shake of his head. He's still a little woozy from the venom and he needs to get his head on straight. He does reach in his pack for his drugs, downing a few pills and drinking the water.

"Nope, but if he's around here, then the Legion's probably got him. Might still be alive if you're quick. Heading that way myself. You can tag along if you want."

She's useful.

She gives him a quick smile as she pushes herself to her feet.

"I'll take you up on that." She looks over at Dogmeat.

"How could I turn down that face?"

Dogmeat's getting a few good pets while she tucks away her apple and scrounges a little to pull out some jerky for her.

"Let's go, then. No sense wasting daylight."

He walks on his injured leg a little gingerly for a few steps, but manages to find an even pace once they're outside the building.

"Where the fuck did you come from?"

She's too clean for a wastelander. And the Brotherhood wouldn't save a ghoul. Vaultie have a distinct uniform and a wonder about the world that usually gets them killed.

NCR would make sense, but again...way too clean. With a nice smile.

She nods to his assertion and she'll follow after him as she said she would. There's a single glance back at the bodies, but she's been here long enough to know that the effort to take care of them would be more danger and cost than it's worth around here, even for her. She considers the question for a few steps before she offers her answer.

"You want the short answer, or the much longer answer that's going to make you think I'm crazy for about five minutes?"

The desert is not particularly forgiving, but he looks over to her with a wary sort of sigh, worried about her being able to fare well in the radiation and the heat. He doesn't really want to deal with another dead body, and that thought annoys him.

He shouldn't care.

"Longer answer," he says. It'd be nice to get out of his own head.

She nods, acknowledging that, before she starts talking. She doesn't seem to be having any trouble with the terrain.

"Completely different world," she says, "with a completely different timeline. Ours isn't even this far forward, to be honest. You're like... a century past the one I'm coming from."

Beat.

"Well, the one I started from."

She keeps walking.

"Now, let me show you how I do that so you don't think I'm nuts and we can actually talk about things. Sound good?"

Oh good. She really is a wastelander. Just one that's found a way to brush her teeth and hair. But the radiation's addled her brain.

"Sure," he tells her without actually looking over.

She looks over at him.

"Please don't shoot me. It's probably going to startle you."

She points to a spot about a half a football field away, next to the remains of an old bus.

"I'm going to go right there, right on the top. It's me. Don't shoot. Okay?"

Don't shoot? Well, fuck. That doesn't bode well. He finally turns to look at her, squinting into the sun, and then holds out his hands at his sides, away from his firearms.

"Fine. Do what you're gonna do," he drawls.

She nods. And while she's right in his vision, staring into his...

She disappears. And then he'll hear her, from the bus.

"See what I mean?!"

He steps back and is annoyed to realize that she was right and his hand goes right for the gun at his hip. But he immediately looks over to the ruined bus and sees her there, right where she said she would be.

"What the fuck was that?" he asks as if she didn't just give him a quick rundown of what was going to happen.

He'll see her point to where he is, hold up her hand, and count down three, two, one,

And then she's right there next to him again, not even a drop or a bounce. Just... there.

"That," she says, keeping her tone steady, "is how I travel around. And how I got here."

She turns her hand to pull up something from her bag, a Vault-tec poster, one that looks very crumpled but still, very distinct.

"I found this in a completely different world. And when I followed it, it brought me here, to your world."

Edited 2026-02-12 02:41 (UTC)

He reaches out to try and snatch the poster from her. "Well, you took a wrong turn somewhere, sweetheart, because this is the wrong alley to find yourself in," he says with a sigh.

She glances around before turning back to him, though she won't take the poster from him. She hardly needs it now.

"You haven't seen the rest of 'em." But she shakes her head. "More importantly, this is where the trail led. So now it's just a matter of finding the next piece. Or, hopefully, Breaker himself."

He inspects the poster with a critical eye, ripping it in half, right through that fucking smiling face with the thumbs up, and steps over it as he continues to the desert.

"Well, come on. The Legion probably has your friend strung up and crucified by now."

And she winces as she hears that.

"I wish that didn't sound so likely." She tilts her head back to where she'd come from. "I heard from the people who taught me about the antivenom that the Legion is bad news. They didn't want to talk too much about it. Do you mind telling me more?"

He loves shittalking the factions and there's a grin as he does.

"They're a bunch of idiots who wanna live out the Roman glory days. Go around following their Caesar, but they call him their Kai-ser, and taking slaves and conquering places as they go. They got a beef with the NCR, but I don't think they have been a threat in a while."

"The NCR being the 'New California Republic', right?"

Because she did hear about them. Her nose scrunches in distaste from the description of the Legion.

"They got the skills to back up the crazy or just... lots of guns and numbers?"

The Legions had been an effective fighting force for a lot of reasons.

In the Wasteland

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