Let’s say you’re James.
You’ve decided to go back to the wasteland and fix the water purifier, risks be damned, but the transition from Vault sheets to wasteland streets is worse than you could have possibly imagined. Glowing water and feral dogs and scabrous humans leave you a physically and morally exhausted wreck. In the cynical days of adjustment you become certain you’ll never finish your great work, never reunite with your only child. You’ll be preyed on by a string of greedy wasteland pirates and parasites until all your efforts to help the world are forgotten to the dust of time.
And then you stumble onto Galaxy News Radio and everything changes. Here at last you’ve found another genuine altruist in the hellish melee. He welcomes you, a stranger, into his heavily-guarded studio for an interview where you end up asking all the questions. He is thoughtful, savvy, warm, and patient. When you leave, he broadcasts on his radio station:
So if you see James out there, you say hello. Be kind to our new brother, and show him that here on the outside, we always fight the good fight.
Then after a brief and embarrassing episode in a creepy vault you wander back to the station for a visit and an interview—hoping to give his audience a PSA about drinking water and trusting strange computer programs, perhaps—and after cracking a couple Nukas, Three Dog casually mentions:
“By the way, your kid says hello.”
“What?” You’re stupefied. “My child came here…and didn’t even ask where I’d gone?”
“That did come up. Kind of a whiny kid you’ve got, actually. All ‘wah wah, where’s my dad, where’s my dad.’ And I’m like, does the kid need a night light for pete’s sake?”
“Did you say where I’d gone?”
“I sort of did. I mean, I said I knew where you’d gone, and that I’d share that info…in exchange for just, like, a tiny errand.”
“What errand did you…”
“Steal a giant radio dish from super mutant infested territory. So, you know. A desperate teenager from a soft vault upbringing seemed like the ideal person for the job.”
“How?!”
“Okay, you got me. I just didn’t want to have to ask the paladins to do it.” He checks his calendar. “Come to think of it, all this was a couple months ago. If I had to guess, I’d say your kid really sucked at fighting the good fight.”
The world spins. Your forgotten, shallow breaths lap the open mic—a live feed of your pain and suffering to Three Dog’s many, many worshipers. Your only family just died trying to find you, and died for no reason at all–except a desperate need to find and reunite with you.
“Say,” says Three Dog brightly, “you doing anything right now? And do you know where the museum is?”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Overhaulout Part 4.5: Dish and Dog”
Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.
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