"I am a caravaneer...well I used to be I guess. All my stuff has been burnt to the ground, my dear Brahmin killed, my work pals murdered..."
There's a clear hint of sadness in your tone. You don't know where you are, but you are certain that you are being flown far away. All your trade routes, your many contacts, your savings... all gone. Will you be able to rebuild your empire from the ashes, or are you destined to be one of the many traders that never rises up and constantly lives in squalor?
"Oh!" The ghoulette says. "That's great! Even a decrepit raider slaver like me makes use of traders from time to time. Sadly not everything can be obtained at gunpoint ya know? There's one thing that I wonder thought... how the hell do you all get so much pre-war stuff? I mean, jeez, it has been 250 years since the 2077 Nukathlon, all the old world stuff should be gone by now."
"You'd be surprised by how much stuff one can find here and there, but you are right, every day its harder to find good stuff among the ruins."
Your grandfather used to tell you stories about how during his youth most buildings were full of intact pre-war goods, how there were plenty of unopened stashes and safes, and how they never ever went hungry. Nowadays most of the good stuff is gone, fortunately the advanced industry of the New California Republic has allowed to substitute most pre-war goods with new post-war ones, they aren't as good, but they serve their purpose. There's of course still a few things that haven't been replicated, lost technology that is impossible to make again, that's the stuff of legend among your folk, finding something like that could easily net you thousands of caps. You wonder how will this new wasteland look like, perhaps it might still hold several treasures in it, perhaps this fateful twist in your life might end being something good.
Nah, no way, you are going to become a slave in some far and unknown land. There's no future for you.
As you ponder about your terrible destiny the people around you start to slowly wake up, you hope that the Ghoulette finishes her work with you soon and moves to study somebody else, the torture of enduring her stank gum breath falls is simply too much.
"Alright.. so far so good! You are healthy and your old work as a trader might get you a comfy job as a shop owner or something... I don't know. Anyway, here's the last question... Age and Race? Now, this is pretty important because this might change your overall value greatly."
"I'm about twenty, don't know my real birthday, but twenty-five is a good guess. And I'm obviously a human." You know that some ghouls have cataracts and a really poor vision, but the ghoulette was only mere inches away from you, couldn't she see that you were a human?
"Well duh." She says, as she writes it all down, clearly annoyed at your snarky sarcasm. "It's just paperwork, no need to be such a dumbass 'bout it."
The ghoulette then seems to be happy with the result and proceeds to place an explosive collar around your neck. You've seen these types collars plenty of times before, they are illegal contraband in the NCR but many collectors pay good caps for them, especially if they are collars that once belonged to Legion of Caesar slaves and have on them authentic Legion iconography or trinkets like old denarii or small metal bulls hanging from them. You have traded with these collars plenty of times, you even forged a few of them, but you are no slaver, you made sure that the collars had no explosive charge on them and that they could never be retrofitted and reused as real slave controlling devices. It's an ironic twist of fate that you are now wearing one of them, and a real one to boot. Seems like you passed the test, you are fit and healthy enough to be sold as a slave, who knows, maybe the ones that are too weak or sickly are simply kicked out from the plane, or are perhaps sold to cannibals as long pork.
Suddenly, a threatening voice booms over the plane's radio. It was clear and loud enough to be heard even from your position. The volume so high that it even awoke several other captured slaves.
"Unidentified aircraft, you are flying over Enclave Airspace, change your vectors seven degrees to the east or we will open fire. This will be our only warning."
The Enclave…? that cannot be right. The pilot then bends down to grab the radio and answer, it was then that you noticed that the pilot is indeed a robot, but a particular one, it was a heavily modified Protectron that lacked legs and was bolted to the pilot's seat, it was one with the plane, and in a sense, you were inside of him.
"Fuck off you patriotic g-men!" The pilot started to scream with a screechy and distorted robotic voice. "Suck on my balls of steel and let me make you moan with my big and vibrating cathode tube!!! Please assume the position and remember! Numbness will subside in several minutes!!!"
The pilot's screams further awakened several more of the captured slaves. You slowly shook your head in disbelief, you weren't on a plane, you were in a flying madhouse.
"...Shit, it's not like I need a reason to blast off muties and wastelanders." Was the short and threatening answer from the other side of the line.
Mere seconds later a guided missile passes by whistling, the pilot quickly nosedives the plane and directs it straight into the ocean below before quickly ascending back up, you can feel your stomach and even more puke coming towards your mouth, you aren't alone thought, several of the other slaves start to belch and puke. Despite the pilot's best attempts at dodging the incoming missiles there were simply too many of them. Suddenly the left engine violently explodes, it's hard to say if one of the rockets hit it or the strain of the maneouvers was simply too much for it, regardless of the cause the entire plane starts crumbling and shaking, a dozen gas masks get automatically released from the ceiling. The lights go out.
The damage that the missile did was critical, the plane starts to fall into the ocean blue, it simply cannot sustain itself in the air anymore, crash landing is now inevitable. None of you were using seatbelts of any kind, and so as the plane starts nosediving and spinning towards its doom all of you start violently bouncing across the plane's interior walls. The few remaining asleep slaves were now due to a rude awakening, the ones that were wide awake were confused and terrified at equal parts, the ghoulette has become a screeching banshee that desperately attempts to cling onto the walls.
You too become a human pinball, your ropes break down liberating you, but that matters not now. The plane's tail explodes in a thousand pieces, several of the slaves fly away while screaming. That's all there is now, fire and screams, the sound of bending metal and cracking glass.
And then… darkness.
As you open your eyes you find yourself dazed and lingering among a sea of corpses and debris. The downed plane weakly floats in the radioactive waters, only the broken tail and part of the cabin are above the water, but it won't be long until they sink as well. The piloting Protectron is trapped upon his seat, unable to leave as he is literally bolted to the cabin itself. Slowly the plane starts going deeper and deeper into the waters, it doesn't take the robot long to short circuit and die violently in a shower of sparks, smoke, and fire.
There's chaos everywhere, several pieces of the plane float around you but they are all on fire, making it impossible to hold onto them, there are also boxes full of precious cargo items like weapons or food, but they all quickly sink down upon the crystal-clear waters. As the seconds pass by more and more corpses start to float around. Close to you is the psychotic sexual harasser ghoul, she is trapped under some debris and screaming her lungs out for help. You try to swim towards her, but your muscles are completely sore from being bound for so long, and the burning debris that separates you two make it impossible to reach her anyway. She looks at you with fear in her eyes but in the end, the two of you know that she is doomed, and soon enough the metal that trapped her sinks and drags her down, but not before she blows you a kiss with what could have been her last breath.
Your brain is screaming in desperation, sending your body countless of stress signals in a hopeless attempt at giving you a chance at survival. You want to move your arms and stay afloat, but it looks like your luck has run out, nothing but a weak twitch comes out of your fingertips. Your body is too tired, too beaten up, and still slightly numb and paralyzed from the drugs that the slavers used to capture you. And so, like many others, you simply fall deep, deep, deep.
As you descend into the bottom of the ocean you start to remember glimpses of the past, is this your life reel flashing in front of your eyes? Is your brain telling you that this is it?
You recall how you once spent an entire week living underground in some abandoned metro tunnels to wait out and protect your brahmin and wares from a sudden a violent radstorm. That week inside of that makeshift shelter ultimately made you end enjoying the sensation of being protected from the harsh weather by countless tons of dirt and concrete, but this is nothing in comparison with that, even for you the darkness down here is too palpable and oppressive, almost unbearable. You are suddenly very aware of how small you are. What do they say? That you are nothing but a gear in the machine? You've long been used to thinking that, but now you feel it more than ever.
You are insignificant, and you will have an insignificant death, you'll become another corpse in the bottom of the sea, or perhaps shark chowder, yeah, that's more likely.
And so, you descend deeper still.
As you fall the darkness gives way to a series of eerie ghostly lights. Phosphorescent slugs the size of ponies pulse in the darkness, sunk ships still illuminate their surroundings with weak electric lights, walking half dead glowing ghouls roam the seafloor and brightnen the darkness with their glowing tumors, and countless radioactive barrels full of toxic waste glint in their light. Almost too low to hear, a deep slow rhythm throbs, the heartbeat of some immense creature or a feature of the last bubbles of air leaving your lungs? Hard to say, too scary to think about.
And then, a miracle happens.
Something starts pulling you up. Is it perhaps that your spirit has abandoned your body and you are going to the heavens? No... you are still alive, you feel alive. Weakly you open your eyes and see a netting around your body, a thick rope net that had caught you along with several other crates and countless corpses. The net went up and up, until you were once more back above water.
You are almost at the surface now. Above lies the sun, calling for you with its warmth and its hope bringing light. Under you lies a blanket of cold darkness, and under that, hell. Legend is that the Great War had sunk thousands of nuclear warships and submarines onto the seafloor, and by the looks of it there was a lot of truth to it. Countless radioactive hotspots lied down there along with creatures that were fearsome and nightmare-inducing even before the war mutated them.
The moment you breathe your first gasp of air it feels like a punch to the gut and the most delicious food that you could ever imagine all in one. Your body burns, it feels as if it were frozen and melting at the same time.
Had it been good luck? Only time would say.
The netting drags you like a leaf in the wind. As you are violently pulled you feel like a complete fool. You have travelled far and wide, witnessed what few folks have seen, walked more than most people walk in several lifetimes, seen massive mountains and endless coastlines. You never thought that you would be able to surpass your father, you see, each one of your ancestors went further and further, pushed their horizons to the limit. Your great-great-grandfather merely traded around the settlements surrounding his hometown, your great-grandfather went further away and travelled to distant towns to sell his goods, your grandfather was the first one in your family that that crossed state lines to trade, and your father followed suit and surpassed him by crossing into what once was Mexico to sell and make a profit. You thought you would never beat him, but now, here you are, an ocean away. You too have surpassed the milestones of the past, you have travelled further than any of them.
Well, perhaps you are being too optimistic, even if a fishing net has caught you and is pulling you upwards you might still die before reaching the shore. The countless drowned corpses around you are proof of it. Maybe these are pirates, or something worse. You try to move but nothing but unbearably painful cramps come from your bones and muscles. A mixture of blood and bubbles starts to escape from your nose and mouth, you are completely done. If these fishermen, or whoever they are, want to murder you, then you are done for, you are in no fighting condition right now. Did you escape a hellish future just to fall into another hellish end?
No.
As your vision readjusts to the light you see that the vessel that rescued you is an old pre-war fishing tugboat. There were no pirates aboard, but mere people trying to make an honest living. Luckily for you the people that dragged you from a watery grave are good and benevolent. As you barely stay conscious you witness one of the fishermen detecting that you are alive, and quickly screaming for the others to come. They take you towards a room and start trying to save your life. With a weak smile and a barely audible thank you then you slip into unconsciousness.
You have no dreams; you simply wake up and find yourself covered in plant leaves with balms on them, strange glowing leeches that seemingly sucked the rads out of your body and plenty of dirty and bloodied bandages along with a Rad-Away bag hooked into your arm. Your muscles still hurt, even breathing hurts, you slowly arise from your slumber incredibly hungry and thirsty. Between being drugged and kidnapped, falling and floating in the waters for who knows how long, and this exhaustion induced nap you might have spent a few days without any clean water or food.
You must have gotten really hurt and soaked a lot of rads while underwater because there are plenty of spent stimpaks and rad-away bags around you.
"Are you finally awake?" Says someone next to you, slow and painfully you look to your left and see an old ghoulish captain sitting next to. He's dressed in old raggedy fisherman clothes decorated with medals of several types, most of them being too damaged to read or clearly made from cloth and Nuka-cola bottlecaps. He's peacefully reading some old romantic novella while smoking from a pipe made from rotten wood that is nearly completely encrusted with salt. The moment he notices that you are fully conscious he leaves his book on the floor next to him and gladly gives you a nearby cup of hot and steamy soup. The soup is thick and dark, with rich smelling aroma coming out of it and chunks of what seemed like tatos and Cram floating in it.
"Name's Saltgut, seems like you had a rough day eh champ?" He then says with a voice that sounds like someone who gurgled a mixture of spit and chewing tobacco.
"Yeah…I'm Howard Wazowski."
"I'm sure you have questions, go ahead. I'll help you as best as I can."
"Where am I?"
The ghoul looks at you puzzled. "You aren't from around here, are you? You don't sound like a local. Oh well, don't let your foreign accent betray you boy, Tourists like you aren't liked around here. Learn the way we speak, use our slang, or else you'll betray yourself. Anyway, we are in Hawaii, or what once was Hawaii, now it's nothing but some islands, a few controlled by the rule of law and a polite society, some others dominated by monsters, both human and inhuman. If you want me to be more precise, well, we are about a hundred miles from the southeast coast of O'ahu. Fish banks are plenty around here and not very irradiated to boot. But we are bordering Enclave territory, so there can be mines or missiles aiming at us right now. That makes other fishermen nervous. Their loss."
"Aren't you afraid?" You ask.
"Nope, I know my bounds. We are good."
"What happened?"
"By the looks of it..." The old ghoul says as he pats your rusty explosive collar with his salt-encrusted pipe. "You were captured and about to be delivered, perhaps to the Sons of Kanaloa, maybe to raiders, hopefully not to the High Evolutionary. I don't know. I think that the plane flew over Enclave airspace, we are close to their turf. And they blew it up, they like to do that sometimes. You are the only survivor that we picked up, the rest either died in the fall, drowned in the sea, or were munched by the local marine fauna, perhaps by a Sha-mano, or maybe a Ghoul Whale..."
Your breathing accelerates. The Enclave? You know that the NCR attacked them in 2242, the Enclave tried to release a virus that would have killed every mutated person in the world, more than 99,9999% of the global population. Fortunately the NCR along with a group of ragtag adventurers and the Brotherhood of Steel destroyed the Oil Rig where they were stationed and put an end to their evil plans. Afterward, they flew away on their Vertibirds, and the few ones that stayed behind went into hiding and were hunted down if discovered. Why are they here?
Before you can even notice it, you space out, the old ghoul continues slowly speaking about names and things you don't know about. Sha-Manos, what the hell are those, some kind of weirdly mutated creature endemic to the Hawaiian wasteland?
Then, Saltgut once more pokes your rusty explosive collar with his pipe. This suddenly brings you back to focus.
"What the hell are you doing?" You yell nervously.
"Jeez, pay attention kid. I was saying that the circuits and explosive charges are surely soaked, broken, and rusty beyond use. But that you should get this thing out anyway, just in case. Walking 'round with that might give the folk the heebie-jeebies."
"Are there any other survivors?"
"Look, we checked ok? Our nets dragged nothing but corpses and corpses. Besides, you were unconscious for a few days, whoever might have been in there... it's dead by now. If there were family or friends of yours out there, I'm sorry, but they are gone."
You sink in your bed and look at the ceiling. Hawaii? There's no way you'll be making your way back to San Francisco. This will be your new home; you will have to get used to it. With a sigh you nod a few times and drink the soup, feeling much better afterwards.
"So, you feeling better? Want to meet the rest of the crew and have a tour around the ship?"
"Yeah, sure." Slowly you leave the soup away and painfully proceed to stand up. Your legs feel weak, your balance is skewed, you have spent too long lying in bed, and being on a moving and tilting ship doesn't help at all.
"You got hurt badly and soaked some nasty rads. Good thing I know a trick or two to stay healthy 'roun here." He says with a coarse laugh as he pats your shoulder.
With every movement your muscles ache and hurt, you can see some nasty bruises and even a new scar or two.
"Wow, hold up buckaroo. Are you sure you are fine to walk and move? You just woke up from a crash landing." You nod and Saltgut gives you his hand, and with his help you finally get on your feet and walk away.
The ship you are at is old and rusty, it is clearly pre-war, possibly one of the last working ships of this model. More than two centuries have passed since the Great-War, the mighty machines that they built during that age are starting to break down and fail at an alarming rate. People are resourceful, they have learned to fix what breaks, first they used spare pieces and the right tools, and when those ran out scrap and jury rigging did the trick. But now, even those techniques are failing and every day more and more machines are becoming impossible to fix. Every day a new thing breaks down, and there is nothing that can be done to get it fixed, every day more and more old technology gets lost. Seeing an old beast like this is impressive, but sad in a melancholic way, you know that someday it will break down and become irreparable. No matter how hard people try in the post-nuclear world the rate of degradation will always outpace the rate of reparation.
"I know what you are thinking. You look like I do when I think about this dear lady." Saltgut chimes. "You are wondering how can this rust bucket continue floating and how long it has until it finally breaks down right?" His voice has a hint of sadness and melancholy on it. "I have been sailing this beautiful tugboat for centuries already. I have witnessed crewmembers come and go. I don't know how long she will have. But I have learned to love every single rusted inch of her body. And when she goes down, I will go down with her. But that won't be today. So c'mon, walk with me, let me show you my beloved Rustbucket."
You two slowly leave the nursery and walk across the corridors of the massive tugboat. Despite of its old age and the rust the ship is heavily decorated with old posters, tattered rags and flags, oil paintings, string lights and even mosaics made with old seashells and small rocks. Overall, the place looks homely and comfy.
"What exactly do you do here?" You ask.
"We fish. But sometimes fish banks are too small, too irradiated, too mutated. So, we look for underwater junk and trash, we sell the valuable stuff, use what we can for repairs and keep the rest to make art projects or small trinkets like necklaces, earrings and so on. It's good to keep us sane and entertained, and sometimes when we have too many of them, we can even sell them up for good money."
"Uh. Interesting." Perhaps your trading knowhow and skills might make this old ship into something extremely profitable. Making them rich would be a great way of repaying them for saving your life.
"Oh, by the way, the net caught several things from the plane. Most are in a pretty bad condition, but you can get some." Saltgut says, as he picks a box that he had prepared and left outside of the room.
