CHAPTER 6
After my rousing sermon the cultists were more than willing follow my every command, their eyes alight, with fervor under the green glow. I tasked them with presenting me what remained of the cartographic archives, little remained but decayed scraps.
Save for one. Sealed within a steel cylindrical container, flattening the pristine map onto the podium revealed the entirety of Mt. Desert island along with a smidge of the coast of Maine northwards . And It seems I was somewhat correct in my earlier estimates during that miserable hike towards town proved roughly correct at the Island rounding out at a solid 108 square miles—not insignificant when traversed on foot. The faded ink marked key locations.
Taking note of Acadia—the old naval listening post. But drifting to what truly caught my attention earnestly: The Cliff's Edge Hotel. If memory served (and it always did), that is the site of the island's sole Vault is located— albeit incomplete. While the Nucleus, which should be on the western side of the island comes to mind—noting the dearth of any marking denoting its existence. Predictable. Blacksite locations rarely appeared on charts, even pre-war. Either way, I do not wish to set down roots anywhere where I could choke on reactor runoff or have to spelunk through another one of those metal coffins. Already having my fill of both radiation and submarines for this lifetime.
While Acadia would have been a prime locale to perform a hostile takeover, it is most likely filled to the brim with synth escapees and technology alike. Which I and by extension any of these wretches aren't ready to face. Even I am not so optimistic of our chances.These are recent converted Far harbor civies after all. Fishermen, hunters, and the like… I doubt they'd pose much of a threat to the conclave of runaways, suicide tactics or not. The vault is a more than acceptable alternative, a veritable mausoleum populated solely by rich pre-war incompetents stuffed into robo-brains alongside their robotic servants. Why they would accept transference into glorified toasters is beyond me—disgusting, but convenient for them I suppose. Either way, it should be fairly easy pickings, on the condition I get my hands on a Pip-boy or something of the like to bypass the security. I asked my—ugh— acolytes, if they had something of the like.
"Do any of you," I gestured at the huddled zealots, "possess a Pip-Boy? Or even a terminal bypass chip?"
A murmur passed through the crowd before a hunched woman shuffled forward, offering a corroded Pip-Boy 2000. its ceramo-polymer casing scarred by claws and seeped with grime.
The moment my fingers brushed its ports, my Projektor flared without consent—
—2066: Assembly lines in Texas stamp out its circuits.—
—October 23, 2077: An admiral watches missiles streak across a battleship's deck, his wrist weighed down by this very device.—
—Centuries of carnage, Owners dying screaming—until a fog crawler's talon splits the last one's skull, crushing the Pip-Boy underfoot.—
I laughed. A sharp, unhinged sound that startled the cultists. Some tittered nervously, joining in like sycophants. Pacing, I clutched the device as the revelation burned through me:
Retrocognition.
Of all the latent talents to manifest now—the ability to psychometrically reconstruct an object's past.Eventually… every rusted pre-war relic in this godforsaken wasteland could just become an open textbook. The Institute's synth production logs? Mine. Big MT's schematics? Mine! Even the Brotherhood's ridiculous airships, MINE!
If only Senior Researcher Hirsch could see me now.
No…
No—had I manifested this talent in my past life, the Party would've frozen me and my mind for snapshots, churning out a new Replika line: Gestapo units with my face, my consciousness trapped in perpetual cryo for "persona preservation." A dark chortle, what a scary thought.
The dark chortle died in my throat as I noticed the cultists' stares. Their eyes—wide with something between awe and terror—locked onto my Projektor's fading crimson pulse. The hunched woman who'd offered the Pip-Boy knelt abruptly, her joints cracking.
"The Glow sings through you," she rasped, pressing her rad-scabbed forehead to the floor. A dozen more followed, their breath ragged with devotion.
I flexed my fingers around the Pip-Boy. Their groveling should have been satisfying. Instead, it itched like a poorly fitted neural bridge. This was the Party's true weapon, wasn't it? Not Replikas, not bioresonance—just the right lie, fed to desperate minds.
One that I now wield.
"On the morrow, I will need one of you to escort me to the Hotel a few miles north of here. One of the more experienced hunters will do. Though for now, show me to where my dwellings for the night will be, and bring me tools. See if Atom's blessing allows me to repair this device to some degree." Hiding the need to scrunch my nose at the garbage spewing from my mouth.
"At once, Herald," the preacher croaked, snapping his fingers. Two acolytes scurried off like irradiated rats, their bare feet slapping against the concrete. The rest lingered, their gazes darting between my Projektor and the Pip-Boy as if expecting it to bleed revelation.
The hunched woman—"Sister Delta," the preacher called her—shuffled forward, clutching a rusted lantern. "Our finest quarters await you," she wheezed, the words bubbling through lungs half-melted by rads. "Purified by Atom's breath."
Purified. A euphemism for doused in gamma rays until the mold gave up most likely. Wonderful.
I followed her through a corroded bulkhead, down a passage lined with cracked fusion cores set into alcoves like saintly relics. The air thickened with the stench of ozone and incense.
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The so-called "finest quarters" turned out to be a repurposed storage locker, its walls lined with peeling lead paint and a mattress that smelled vaguely of fish guts and iodine. Sister Delta bowed out with a wheezing cough, leaving me alone with the Pip-Boy and a rusted toolbox one of the acolytes had scavenged from Nation-knows-where.
I flicked open the Pip-Boy's casing, grimacing at the corrosion eating away at its circuits. Pre-war craftsmanship, I mused, built to last—just not this long. My Projektor hummed as I ran a fingertip along the motherboard, catching flickers of its past—
—A Vault-Tec engineer in a pristine lab, cursing as he calibrated the device.—
—A soldier's bloodied hand slamming it against a console, the screen flickering with missile trajectories.—
—A ghoul's gnarled fingers prying at its ports, centuries later, before a fog crawler's talons split his skull.—
Focus.
I exhaled, pushing the visions aside. The device was a wreck, but not beyond salvation. With careful application of bioresonance—gentler this time—I nudged the corroded connections back into alignment, coaxing dormant pathways to life. The screen flickered, then spat out a garbled string of code.
ERROR: BIOS CORRUPTION DETECTED
BOOT SEQUENCE FAILED
Scheiße.
I leaned back, rubbing my temples. The Pip-Boy wasn't just damaged—it was missing something. A chip, perhaps, or a firmware update that had degraded into oblivion. Without it, I'd be hacking into the Vault blind.
A knock at the door interrupted my brooding.
"Herald?" A voice rasped—the preacher. "Brother Elias has returned from patrol. He knows the paths to the Cliff's Edge better than any."
I snapped the Pip-Boy shut. "Send him in."
The man who entered wasn't like the other zealots. No rad-scars, no milky eyes—just a hunter's lean frame and a rifle slung across his back. His gaze skipped over my Projektor like it was an elephant in a room.
"You're the one they're calling 'Herald,'" he said, voice flat. Not a question.
I smirked. "And you're the one who didn't grovel."
His jaw tightened. "I serve Atom. Not every glow-eyed stranger who washes ashore."
Ah. A skeptic. Or just a man who'd seen too many false prophets.
"Then you'll understand," I said, holding up the Pip-Boy, "that this is the key to unlocking Atom's next gift. And I need your help reaching that figurative lock."
Elias stared at the device, then at me. "The Hotel's crawling with ferals. And machines—Protectrons, Mister Gutsies, maybe worse. But that ain't what you should worry about."
I raised a brow. "Oh?"
He leaned in, his breath reeking of radstag jerky and tobacco.
"The ferals up there… they ain't like the others. They don't just attack. Sometimes they stop. Sometimes they… praise."
"Praise?"
"Same words, over and over. 'The Drowned One sees us.' Then they kneel. Right there in the Fog, like they're waiting for something."
A prickle ran down my spine. "And?"
Elias's fingers tightened around his rifle strap. "Sometimes… the Fog moves back."
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Author's Note: I'm playing up the whole bioresonance thing not being fully understood up a bit and going pseudo 40k warp-ish. Things like the fog-mother being small entities, yada yada, spawned from humanities' collective bioresonant subconscious/consciousness.
Also Beta'd by Deepseek Ai.