Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ A Certain Machinist ❯ Ru-Baby ( Chapter 10 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

 

TEN

 

 

Many things in this world are weird. Non-radioactive water from a well that should be contaminated is a blessing, but it isn’t natural either. Some of the other sciences are weird. Codsworth has an AI. It isn’t a great AI, but he’s got enough standard responses to pass a Turing test. And don’t even start on the guns. Those shouldn’t work, but they do.

 

And then there were the plants. Much like Chernobyl, once people left to escape the leaked radiation, the plants and animals came back. Some of them. Insects mostly die in radiation, but some have adapted to be huge, which normally is impossible without much higher oxygen levels. Insects don’t have lungs. They have vesicles, which do very basic gas exchange without air pumping through. I did say it was basic. So they only get so big, most being very small. Many of the animals I’ve spotted on the edge of the neighborhood here are missing patches of skin and have exposed bleeding wounds. Animals should die from that. Relatively quickly, they should die. There are fish in the water. Most are mutated, and they should be dead. Fish are very susceptible to radiation and generally die en-masse, like insects. Yet here in just over two centuries they’d evolved both hostile and ordinary sorts of fish with tolerance for the radiation in the water. Some had bulges and sores, but they were alive.

 

The trees that were alive had leaves. Some had died during the initial blast. Some were down or had fallen in the last two hundred years. A few were standing dead wood and could be felled for timber… if they weren’t rotten. There were very few birds, just the rare crow that I’d seen. Or maybe ravens. They don’t caw or croak, and I didn’t see the tail to be sure.

 

The plants though, they were the weirdest of all. Maybe it was the radiation, or maybe it was the weather, but they didn’t grow over a season and produce fruit with seeds at the end. Nope, the upshot of the rate at which plants grow here is you can harvest every three days. If you water a plant regularly it flowers and fruits in a day, and the fruit contains seeds you can plant and repeat the process. The pumpkins rapidly took over significant open ground. I also found some kernels of corn and planted those, and those actually grew into corn plants, with several ears I was able to harvest a few days later, instead of the usual months. This place is seriously weird.

 

The more plants I planted, the more food the neighborhood had to share, the more settlers turned up and complained about the need for more beds, and the need for intact roofs and walls. I fixed more roofs and built shutters for the windows.

 

The lake produced giant mosquitoes, several feet long and with a proboscis as long as a rapier, loaded with poison saliva and able to kill a full sized two-headed cow, what they call Brahmin here. Once I’d finished killing the giant bugs I got help to drag the cow up to the cooking area and processed it into steaks, roasts, sausage, salted or smoked and put away in a cool storage that was sufficiently dry.

 

The weather here is weird. Sometimes it rains, which is totally normal. Other times there’s orange flashes and my Geiger counter goes nuts, so I go to that bunker down the street. I’ve installed defensive walls around the opening, which for some reason are able to stop bandits from getting through or using a hammer to remove the boards. It is like they are so drugged up they can’t figure out how to operate a claw hammer and pull a nail.

 

The drug problems here seem serious. There’s a popular inhaler that is loaded with a gas made from fertilizer and some common chemicals that makes its user feel like the world is moving slowly, and those who use it get seriously addicted. Like nicotine, only more addictive but less deadly. OD on nicotine and you stop breathing. Use Jet and you get the shakes, apparently. That’s what one of my new settlers named Jane told me. Most bandits are addicted to Jet, and it rots their brains and makes them hyper violent. They attack anyone, even each other. For some reason the recipes I found in one of the working computer terminals included the recipes for Jet, Mentats, Buffout, and how to make Refreshing Beverage, a drink that cures both addictions and serious radiation contamination. It would clear it out and heal you afterwards. There was also a recipe for a simpler medication called Addictol, which cures addictions without all the benefits of Refreshing Beverage. I found out how to make artificial blood plasma, which is an ingredient in RadAway. The drug chemistry in this world is seriously weird. Way too many common things are useful in something else. This makes the need for a backpack rather obvious to carry stuff you come across.

 

From time to time I would feel like I’d reached some plateau of ability, or perhaps experience with this world and if I stopped a moment to think about it, then focus on some aspect, some kind of understanding would settle within me and I’d be able to do something better afterwards. Like I was less clumsy than I used to be. And I was able to open locks more quickly and smoothly. And I was a bit more stealthy when I went for cover and not everyone seemed to spot me if I held still in the shadows. It was weird. I was also able to stomach the weird radioactive food better. I have to wonder if the body I’m wearing is a bit mutated or advanced genetically from the time period I’m from, nearly three centuries ago.

 

Codsworth killed flies and giant mosquitoes and the rare wild dog in the neighborhood. When I went beyond the houses into the woods to the East, I found some kind of wild fruit bush, with a fruit that was kind of like a grape, only it was a whole bunch of them that grew together, like giant blackberry fruits, seven inches across. The juice was sweet like both berry and grapes, and would probably ferment if left alone for a short time. If I wanted to make alcohol for all its various uses, this is a pretty ideal plant to work from. The pulp left behind after squeezing the juice contained seeds suitable for planting, which I did, and a good base for glue, somewhat less creepy than using the dried collagen on the end of the many human bones I’d found. I’d been considering boiling those down, and then grinding the bones for use in fertilizer additives. The need for phosphorus is considerable, and people die without it. I setup the cooking pot for making glue away from the food area, and close to my growing compost pile. The trick to compost is keeping it warm enough, and damp enough to let the bacteria and fungus work to break things down into components useful to plants without wasting the materials on mushrooms or something that creates poison. This is beyond me, really. I can do machines and chemistry, but I really wish I had a botanist and a biochemist among my settlers. Everybody asks me what they should be doing. I assigned a few to guarding, the rest to cooking or collecting up loose supplies and salvage of copper, crystal, screws and bolts, the usual stuff that you don’t need until you do.

 

Assignments dealt with, I got back to my ideas and constructed a smelter and a bread oven, in different places. The bread oven was useful for cooking stuff, and for smoking meats. I put a settler in charge of that. There were fish in the lake, though most required treatment with a weak RadAway and purified water mix that expelled the radiation. I used a car battery and a specific anode and cathode setup to draw the radio-isotope ions to the anode, which I extracted and cleaned into a lead container every day. The fluid removed radiation from the fish, so it became food I could then kill, clean, and eat or smoke to keep longer without refrigeration. Smoked fish was both tasty and light weight, and the ones that tasted too strong I ended up drying and pounding into fish meal, something I’d gotten a taste for in Tucson at a local American Indian restaurant, which put it into the traditional squash, corn, and bean dishes.

 

It was two weeks of building and gaining settlers before a trader showed up with a two headed cow loaded with crates and various goods for trade. I talked to her, a grim faced woman with short hair, post Wall, and I’d witnessed her dramatically terrifying Old West quickdraw on a giant blue rattlesnake on the far side of the still standing bridge off the island. I haven’t been across it yet, mainly because that snake is incredibly aggressive, and I’d been warned by settlers about it. She had some Razorgrain for trade, and Coffee Beans, raw ones. I traded clean water and dried fish for those, and she promised to return after trading with some of the settlers on my farm.

 

I planted the grain and coffee beans, fertilizer on them for faster growth, and called it a night. The following morning both plants were three feet tall, more of the terrifying nature of this place. One of the settlers had brought the snake in and was tanning the leather. I opted to try making a spicy dish out of the snake using beans and firecracker berries, which were actually really small chili peppers I’d found in the back 40. They were pretty spicy so I used a handful to make this into Rattlesnake Chili. The local beans and corn helped that round out pretty well, and I roasted pumpkins and served the chili in them to the settlers after trying it myself. Honestly, I don’t know how I got eight servings from that one snake, but it was over fifteen feet long and a foot across, so that had something to do with it. The snake leather was turning into a pair of pants, predictably blue and scaly. The borax had helped with that tanning process.

 

Nearly everyone of my settlers carried one of those wood-stock pistol zip guns chambered in .38 Special. None of them were rifled, and most of the settlers were good shots despite this, though some got really stupid near walls and trees, wasting ammo shooting the cover in front of them instead of an attacker. I do not know why that is, but they do this. The thing is, while my 10mm ammo and the pistol I’d found in the drug dealer’s house were properly made 10mm, it wasn’t that common. The .38 Special was the dominant ammunition, and that’s a terrible round for auto-feeding firearms. The cases are made for revolvers, and are rimmed. Despite this the locals made single and doublestack box magazines with just enough offset to feed from the side-loading and top ejecting guns. Dangerous? Yes. Likely to jam? Even more yes. But that’s what they used here. As a professional gun maker and weaponsmith I am appalled.

 

The woman who’d tanned the snake and made it into pants approached me while I was muttering over gun problems and trying to make a button rifling system using an electric heating element to pull through a steel pipe for an eventual 10mm carbine barrel announced herself.

 

“Hi. I’m Ruby. This may be a strange question, but is there something wrong with the moon?” she asked me with a cheeky grin. I turned to regard her, then checked the moon to be sure. It was still the moon.

 

“Looks perfectly normal to me. Is the moon all broken up where you come from?” I asked her with a wink. She grinned.

 

“You look really different. I wasn’t sure at first. When I asked the goddess for help finding my lost love I was a bit surprised to learn you’d returned to your home planet,” she admitted.

 

“This isn’t my home planet, exactly. It is similar, same planet, but not the same history as I grew up with. This place is… kinda weird,” I said.

 

“I noticed that myself. Not a lot similar to Remnant. Lots of things and people trying to kill you though, so not that different either,” she answered. I shrugged, looking her up and down.

 

“So I notice you’ve grown,” I said, admitting to myself that Ruby was no teenager anymore. She was six inches taller and had real boobs now. More like her sister, only with hair so deep a red it was nearly black.

 

“Yep. Not jailbait anymore. You were my one regret,” she admitted.

 

“You were sixteen,” I reminded her. “And I was very married.”

 

“Well, I’m twenty-two here, and you aren’t married. Sorry for your loss.”

 

“Do you mean Glynda?” I asked, concerned.

 

“Oh, nah. Glynda raised your girl herself, and lived to a ripe old age, probably. I don’t know for sure because I died in my thirties, hunting. A boarbatusk caught me by surprise and my aura broke before some other grim slashed me apart. It was quick.”

 

“So was my end. I just finished letting Pyrrha out and I got sniped dead while staring at the stars. Not that different from how I arrived in your world. My own world is a lot more peaceful and sane than here. This place is weird. All the locals carry zipguns made with pipes and wood, the plants grow three feet a day and produce fruit every twenty four hours. The water from my well isn’t radioactive but the water source in the lake over there is plenty hot, yet the ambient radiation in this sweaty air is low. They have radioactive thunderstorms where the lightning flashes causes serious radiation burn unless you’re underground, and I have a bunker if you’re interested, but the locals just take RadAway and Rad-X to avoid damage or cure it.”

 

“Have you seen much of the Commonwealth?” Ruby asked me.

 

“Just this island. How about you?” I asked her.

 

“I got dropped outside the University near Jamaica Plain. A lot of people have shot at me. My aura has broken a few times, and I’m not as fast here for some reason. Though they can’t seem to do much damage when I’m sprinting. I ended up running from some giant lizard creature with claws like big curved daggers, and had to climb fire escapes and jump across rooftops to get away. There are robots with guns. There are bandits taking drugs everywhere. They shoot at anything that comes nearby, including each other. There are giant green men who smell like rotting meat and yell at you. This is kind of a bad place, this Commonwealth. Do you think they meant the name to be ironic?” she finished with that question.

 

I hugged her then, and she hugged me back.

 

“I missed you. I was thinking about you several times since I came here. You’re good at cheering people up. I do have some bad news,” I warned her.

 

“What?” she asked, worried.

 

“I have coffee, but no chocolate. There is no chocolate. I’ve asked my settlers about it, and they have no idea what it is.”

 

Ruby froze and stared up at me with a look of horror.

 

“No. No, it can’t be! Say it isn’t so!” she demanded.

 

“All the chocolate trees are probably still in Peru and Ecuador and Chile and Colombia. There’s no boat traffic between Boston and there. We are either going to have to travel there ourselves and rebuild civilization enough to process the fruit into candy, or we are going to have to civilize this world enough to get people there to re-establish trade to bring it here, six thousand miles away.”

 

“What’s a mile?” Ruby asked, confused.

 

“Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet. And a foot is this far apart,” I said holding my hands apart where she could see them.

 

“Wow. That’s a really long way then. How big around is this world?” she asked.

 

“It’s twenty six thousand miles if you walked and boated around the equator, or from the north pole to the south pole and back again around the far side. So pretty big. And most of the planet is covered in oceans, but we have around three times more land than you did. Our continents are bigger than your islands by quite a lot. There’s a globe over in my house,” I said, pointing across the street. “This is, despite its weird history for the last three hundred years of divergence from my world, still the origin of human beings as a species. So you’ve traveled tens or hundreds of thousands of years into the past and across thousands or tens of thousands of light years distance from your home world. Isn’t that exciting?”

 

She stood on her tiptoes then and pulled me down into a kiss. It went on for a long time. She was sweet, insistent, and needy. We retired to my bunker and became athletic and sweaty together for some time before falling asleep in a tangle of limbs. Ruby was a good lover, I have to say. I don’t know if she’s got a new body here, but she’s certainly taller than when I knew her on Remnant, and we won’t know if she’s a regular human until she comes down with pregnancy. As rare as that seems to be in this place, it would be welcome. It also made me think about protective measures to keep her safe from radiation.

 

Maybe I could line her bustier with lead sheet? All the cars have wheel weights, so the source of lead is easy enough. I’ll want to coat them to prevent them leaking into her skin, of course, but that lead is also useful for making bullets. I’m going to need to make 10mm bullets for my eventual weapon. As enjoyable as the very heavy 10mm pistol is, I’d feel far better with a 10mm SMG again. I was used to carrying one on Remnant, and if I can remake that I will be a lot happier. Likewise, Ruby is already working on making her own rifle, based on a hunting rifle she said she found on a rooftop of some gas station near the CIT campus administration building. There was a sign, apparently. And a guardian robot with laser shooting hands, not far from the giant Corvega car plant, which apparently is at the same site as a different car company plant in my own world. Go figure. The Corvega cars are rusting in every driveway, many missing engines and other parts, but apparently some are still partially intact on various roads and parking lots. Why they weren’t stripped decades ago I do not know. It is another mystery. Much like the apparently large number of buildings which are boarded up, despite the need for housing out of the rain, and the coming snow. Its November after all. Snows should be starting at any time. And the Noreasters are famously windy and bad, so I’m really planning to get houses sealed up and heating arranged before then.

 

I’m going to have to reinvent the wood stove, aren’t I? And the chimney. Nobody here has either of those things. And roofs. But I was already reinventing those. I swear these people are weird. Maybe a couple hundred years of radiation storms and deprivation have made them a bit stupid?

 

It was three weeks after I’d arrived in Sanctuary and started rebuilding the place that a tired looking group meandered across the bridge and started ordering my settlers around. It was Aaron who let me know there was a problem. I brought my pistol and Ruby, who’d cobbled together a hunting rifle and fixed a bayonet on the end. It wasn’t her usual level of pure destructive power, but I’d helped reinforce both the barrel and the bayonet mount so they wouldn’t break off easily when she started swinging for the fences.

 

“Howdy. I’m Nate, and I run Sanctuary. What are you folks doin?” I asked their leader, a guy in an antique military uniform and an australian slouch hat and a laser rifle with a literal hand crank on the side.

 

“Preston Garvey, Quincy Minutemen. We heard on the radio from Diamond City that Sanctuary would be a place we could rebuild our lives,” he answered. I hissed. More beds.

 

“Y’all understand this is a farm, right? You work, you eat. It’s as simple as that. But understand that I’m in charge. I repaired these houses, planted these crops, dug the wells and built the generators. This is my property,” I explained. “And I protect what is mine. You are welcome here as long as you ain’t a problem. Can I count on your best behavior?” Naturally, this is when it started to rain again.

 

“Of course. We’re not savages. But understand we really need to rest. We’ve all lost people since the gunners attacked Quincy, and we’ve been fleeing ever since. We were holed up in the Museum of Freedom in Concord for weeks before that mysterious stranger and his girlfriend managed to kill off the last of the raiders and a deathclaw.”

 

“A deathclaw? That’s tough. Find some beds, and we’ll feed you a meal. The water is clean and the roofs don’t leak. It will give you a chance to get out of this rain.”

 

“Thank you. Thank you. That means so much to hear.” The poor guy sagged and staggered off, a sad couple and an old lady following towards one of the bunkhouses I’d cobbled together, the place next door to my own home. It was daylight and most of the settlers were working on their assigned planters or the other jobs. The amount of rad-grain had been expanded into a good field capable of growing enough for bread and brewing. The brewing setup let me make beer, which was hugely popular with the workers after a hard day of effort. Truly, the work wasn’t that hard. I’d even fixed up several park benches and put a radio I’d found in the wreckage of a house near them and some gym equipment, a balance beam and a set of weights with a bench, that this passed for recreation. Diamond City Radio and its tinkling tunes from the 1950’s, for some reason, helped people rest. The robotic turrets protected from bugs and varmints. The food prepared by the baker and cook were healthy and nutritious and people stopped looking so lean and starved. And I even sold Refreshing Beverage for the former addicts. I pushed one onto the old lady, who sipped it and admitted: “I feel… free!” She took a nap later. Don’t know if that will be important later, but such is life.

 

The next morning with a breakfast of rolled oatmeal and mutfruit bits, the new folks from Quincy started work on the farm. The handyman with the silly haircut approached me.

 

“Do you think you could help us out?” he asked.

 

“Helping yourself is the best kind a man can have,” I pointed out.

 

“We could really use some beds,” he asked.

 

“You don’t look injured. I’ve got a lot of things to do. Why don’t you use the spare parts and my work bench over there to make beds for you and your friends?” I suggested.

 

“Look, I tinker. I’m good with my hands, but are you gonna help or not?” he complained. I raised an eyebrow.

 

“Then you’re just the man for the job of making beds, aren’t you?” I pointed out. “After you put them in that house over there you can can started repairing the roof and walls and put in some shutters to keep the weather and the giant bugs out. Maybe after that you can drill a well and attach the plumbing so the toilet and sinks work. Might make it really pleasant before the winter weather sets in.” He stared at me, dumbfounded that I wouldn’t just do what he wanted when he rolled up the day prior.

 

“So you’re not going to do it?” he confirmed.

 

“I have other things to do,” I gestured to the whole community of Sanctuary, clearly busy. The man stumbled away, like a confused Millenial who didn’t get a participation trophy. I got back to work on my blast furnace. After that I worked on my portable cutting torch, using a modified laser pistol and a high speed fan. The trick with laser cutting is the molted metal can flow back together and reweld, so the fan and jet of air will help clear the channel when cutting.

 

My current outfit is a mechanic’s coveralls, coated with asbestos, fireproof leather gloves, welding goggles with flip down lenses, and a hunting cap to keep the sparks out of my hair. I’m not glamorous looking, but Ruby wasn’t complaining and she kept tinkering with her rifle, trying to create a mechanism to extend and contract the bayonet, now that she’d gotten a big enough magazine on the big bolt action rifle. For some reason, all the bolt rifles had left handed bolts, rather than right handed as you’d expect. It was really weird. This was convenient for her, at least, since her fighting style had her cycle the bolt with her left hand. She’d managed to sew up a black cape with a red lining, and combined with the blue snakeskin pants she was very striking looking.

 

I noticed that the mechanic was assembling bed frames and Marcy and Jun were putting together mattresses while Mama Murphy watered some pumpkins. Good for them. I got some of the settlers who weren’t too busy to help carry over some salvaged metal sheets and nailed them carefully to the roof. After around an hour the roof wasn’t leaking and the number of metal panels were laid aside so they could start covering the holes in the walls.

 

Ruby was making .308 ammunition for her rifle. I am sure she actually wants .50 caliber BMG, but I haven’t seen any cases around, and those go through a lot of powder.

 

The telltale crackle of thunder and noise from my Geiger counter warned me, so I headed for the bunker entrance, Ruby sprinting to join me. We settled down, hanging up our clothes to dry while the radio played. The usual activity happened and we passed the time like a couple should.