The Survivor’s Guide to the Wasteland

Tanya POV

*RATATATATATATATATATATAT*

*RATATATATATATATATATATAT*

*RATATATATATATATATATATAT*

Three sentry turrets hooked up to two loud generators fired relentlessly as a hailstorm of bullets rained down upon a giant figure. The creature was easily a dozen feet tall, with eight appendages ending in pointed tips supporting its massive body. Two prominent arms with a claw on each end protruded from its midsection, with a collection of smaller grabbers just underneath. It didn't really have a head, just a torso that flowed into a massive carapace with black, beady eyes protruding from one end.

I saw the Mirelurk Queen being distracted by the gunfire peppering its exterior as a chance and asked my new hive to come out and play.

Almost immediately, two radscorpions burst from the ground and grabbed onto a leg. Under normal circumstances, the abomination would have no problem dispatching two radscorpions. No offense to my new brood, but the size difference was too significant. But with the turrets Basil created out of thin air, the overgrown horseshoe crab was distracted, giving my radscorpions a chance to strike at its weak points.

I watched as one of my radscorpions pinned the leg down so it couldn't move. The other one, which I recognized from the red carapace as Their leader, whom I named Regie, wedged its razor-sharp pincer within the uppermost knuckle and snapped the leg clean off. Before the enraged Mirelurk Queen could get back at the two, they scurried away from the behemoth and dug their way back to the safety of the underground.

*SHRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK*

With the Radscorpions back in hiding, the Mirelurk's attention was drawn back to turrets, and it began dragging itself toward me, Basil, and the defenses. While the turrets did a fine job against the smaller Mireluks, as evidenced by the collection of dead shellfish in the cave, it wasn't doing enough against the big mama.

"Basil! I don't think those turrets will stop that Mirelurk Queen!"

"Yeah, I know! I need you to get out there and draw the Queen away! I got an idea!"

"You want me to do WHAT!?!"

"I need some space! JUST DO IT!"

I looked at Basil like he was crazy. If this were any other person, I'd call them crazy and hightail it out of here to save my own skin. But this was Basil, and I've already seen him do what I thought was impossible. Cursing under my breath, I dashed out from behind our defensive line and started blasting at the Mirelurk Queen. I called for my new brood, and four Radscorpions jumped out of the ground to help me, one scurrying onto the Queen's carapace and making its way toward the Mirelurk's head. At the same time, the other three danced around the legs, stabbing now and then with their stingers at the softer underbelly of the Mirelurk.

I could feel the Radscorpions with my mind, a gentle pressure at the base of my skull receiving their general thoughts. They understood the assignment, and when I made it to the opposite side of the cavern from the turrets, they began shifting toward my side to draw the Mirelurk away from Basil.

The guns had stopped firing at this point, presumably because Basil was working on whatever plan he had in mind. I was confident that whatever he was cooking would work out, but having the turrets out of the picture meant that the Mirelurk Queen could now focus on me and my scorpions.

The one scorpion climbing on the Mirelurk finally got to the top and, without missing a beat, jabbed its venom-loaded stinger right into the dome of the enemy. If I were luckier, that attack would have hit the brain or something similar and instantly killed the Queen. Sadly, this wasn't that type of day.

*SHRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK*

The Mirelurk Queen thrashed around wildly after getting its skull pierced, the scorpion that hurt it not able to cling on and getting flung off. I was worried for a moment when the poor thing crashed into the ground on its back, but I let out a sigh of relief when I saw it quickly flip itself back over and dig itself back under the dirt.

While the sting didn't kill the Mirelurk Queen, it must have done something significant because the behemoth wouldn't stop flailing around and screeching like a banshee. Now fully enraged, the Queen charged at the rock I hid behind. I dove out of the way just in time to see the Mirelurk Queen's claw slam into where I was hiding.

The Queen shrieked as it missed its mark, rapidly turning around and locking onto me. I scrambled to get up, but I was too slow. The Mirelurk Queen showed more speed than its size would suggest it was capable of and was on top of me in no time. As it raised one of its appendages, presumably to try to skewer me, a large explosion blasted the Queen away from me. 

*BOOOOOOOOOM!*

Taking this as my chance, I quickly got up and got the hell out of dodge.

Basil POV

The second Tanya ran out from behind our lines, I wasted no time and pulled up my Pip-Boy. As annoying and stressful as fighting in the abandoned vault was, the process did level me up several times, and I was now level 38, solidly in the mid-game range. Thank goodness I got that bullshit XP modifier mod and cranked that shit up.

I now had 6 skill points to spend after going through the menagerie of wasteland baddies in Vault 88. Navigating to the perk tab, I searched around before spending 3 points to unlock Gun Nut rank 3. As I exited my system, time resumed, and I watched as Tanya and her pack of Radscorpions began drawing attention away from me and to themselves. Not wanting to waste any time and put her in any more danger than she already was, I opened my settlement building system and got to work.

The first thing I did was scrap all the machinegun turrets. When we first got to the water purification center in the East Sector, I knew the Mirelurk Queen was hiding in the aquifer. Tanya was the one who suggested I put some turrets down. I hadn't considered that a viable strategy, but it was a good idea. We were running low on ammo, and what better than an automated machine gun with (theoretically) unlimited ammo to fix that?

It was a good idea, only that I didn't expect three turrets not to be enough. But maybe something with more... 'oomph' would be. After I scrapped the machine gun turrets, I opened the defenses section and scrolled until I found what I was looking for. Damn, I only had enough resources for two. Better than nothing, I guess.

*SHRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK*

The Mirelurk Queen shrieked again. Looking up, I saw that one of Tanya's scorpions had climbed up to the Mirelurk Queen's head and stabbed it with its stinger. That was pretty impressive, until I watched it get flung off like an ant being flung off a kid after biting them, which I guess is technically accurate. It was back on its feet in no time, though. At least the little sucker seemed ok.

I focused back on the task at hand and placed down two new turrets. This time, instead of two rifle barrels poking out from drums of ammunition, it was a large tube with four smaller tubes in the back, held in place by a vice grip of all things. That's right, a missile turret. If I could have a gun boner, it'd be full mast right now.

*SMAAAAAAASH*

I wired the power to the turrets just in time. The Mirelurk Queen had just barely missed squashing Tanya with its giant claws when the turrets turned on. I was beginning to think that I had taken too long when I saw the Mirelurk Queen scurry right on top of Tanya. But right before tragedy could strike, a barrage of rockets flew out of the barrels right before.

I watched as the rocket boosters glowed a faint orange, propelling the warheads up to speed before slamming into the side of the Mirelurk Queen. A series of explosions set off, and the Queen was thrown off balance, nearly toppling over. Tanya, ever quick on the uptake, saw her opportunity and booked it out of there.

"Couldn't have started with that instead of the pea shooters?"

"Look, there's like a million things my power can do. I forgot, ok?"

"Yeah, well, it would have been nice if you told me beforehand or didn't wait till the last second to get that damn thing off me."

I'll be honest, the last thing I expected was an argument, and my default stance was to defend my actions. The adrenaline was pumping, my heart rate was high, and I was in fight mode, but somehow, I got pulled out of that anger trance. I think it was seeing Tanya's fuming face. I've never seen her angry at me, and seeing her pretty face all scrunched up made me realize that maybe she was right.

I took a deep breath before letting out a sigh.

"Yeah, you're right; I should have clued you in on what I was going to do. It's just that a lot is going on, and I kind of got lost in the moment. I'm sorry about not expressing myself better and putting you in danger."

Tanya's anger gradually faded as I kept talking. She sighed before scratching the back of her head and looking awkwardly up at me.

"Thanks. And I'm sorry, too. I can't imagine what it's like to be in your shoes. I shouldn't have blown my top."

Tanya walked up and hugged me. I was still in my power armor, so her arms could only wrap around half of me. It was a nice moment; it's just that the backdrop was wrong. Our moment was interrupted by rockets whirling past us and a sequence of explosions rocking the area.

Tanya pulled away from me, and we drew our attention back to the Mirelurk Queen. Honestly, it was a bit embarrassing that we got distracted anyway. Thankfully, the missile turrets were doing a hell of a job. Maybe even too good of a job.

While whatever magic automated turrets did a pretty good job, some of the rockets would still miss. When one of those rockets hit the cave's wall, a cracking sound reverberated throughout the space, quickly turning into a deep rumble. The ground shook as if during an earthquake, and I watched a fissure form in the wall where the rocket struck. The fissure multiplied, forming a lightning bolt pattern upward toward the ceiling.

First, some pebbles were raining down, then rocks, which quickly escalated into full-on boulders until a stone avalanche rained down. One especially large stone came crashing onto the top of the Mirelurk Queen, knocking it onto its belly. It didn't stop there.

The rock rain continued for almost a minute. Smaller pieces continued to fall. Some blunt, some pointed like a stone icicle. By the end, the cave was filled with dust, clouding our view of what had happened. When the sediment settled, we were greeted by a dead Mirelurk Queen encased in loose rubble. Only part of its back and one giant claw were visible.

"Well, I guess that takes care of that."

"Yeah, but now we also have a massive mess to clean."

There had to be a dozen regular Mirelurk corpses, a Mirelurk Queen corpse, and several tons of loose rock.

"Well, at least this should be the last of the hostiles in this damn place. Why don't you call your friends out, and we start working on tidying this place up?"

Tanya put her fingers between her lips and whistled. Moments later, a small swarm of radscorpions burst from the ground and started skittering toward the dead crabs. I also rolled up the proverbial sleeves and went into the settlement builder to get the place fixed up.

Several Hours Later

Another piece of machinery plopped at the end of a long chain of similar equipment. I was in one of the uranium-filled mines using my settlement builder to place down resource extractors and delivery systems. A long chain of conveyor belts traveled from the drills out of the caves into the main atrium, where they are then placed into refineries. The refineries then take those raw materials and turn them into valuable components.

This was the last section I had to do. These were all exotic miners which could extract oil, crystal, and uranium ore. The uranium could be turned into nuclear material, the crystal into glass, and the oil into plastic or rubber. And that's only the things the exotic miners can drill up.

Other than the exotic miners, there are three more tiers of miners: Basic, Advanced, and Premium. Basic miners extracted iron ore and soil. Advanced miners did aluminum, copper, sulfur, and asbestos. Premium miners could pull gold, silver, and lead. Of course, there are limitations. The least of which was reaching level 3 in the Science! perk and level 2 in the Scavenger perk. After killing the Mirelurk Queen and its spawn, I was now level 40 and had the perk points to spare.

Then, there were the location requirements. It had to be somewhere with solid ground and naturally occurring rare minerals. That limited the options, but thankfully, Vault 88 met all those requirements. It was also just a great place to clear out and make my own. It had a ridiculous amount of space and only a few easily defendable ways to get in. Not to mention the massive water purification station that, after getting fixed, can pump out enough water for a small city.

I also managed to find the Vault 88 blueprints I came here for. Typically, you'd get it after helping Overseer Barstow conduct her inhumane experiments or kill her, but I didn't see her around while exploring, so I got worried. It took a while, but we eventually discovered why she wasn't here to greet us like the game.

In the portable office that Barstow would have been living out of, I was able to dig up her diary. Going through it, I read Barstow's detailing of what went down after she and the workers were trapped after the bombs went off. Most of it was simple status updates, but toward the end, I could read the radiation and ghoulification process's effects on her.

Simply put, in this world, Barstow either lost faith in Vault-tec ever finding her or her faith in Vaultec wasn't enough to stop her from going feral. Besides the diary, digging around in her former abode revealed several holotapes. Inserting them in my Pip-Boy confirmed they were all schematics for the various settlement items from the Vault-tec Workshop DLC.

Nuclear generators, clinics, furniture, water pumps, the whole shabang. I got what would probably take decades of research and development basically for free. Sure, it wasn't institute levels of tech, but I could give most factions in the Fallout universe a run for their money with what I got my hands on.

I had to scrap every last bit of what I could find in the vault. After the spring cleaning, I was able to scavenge enough materials to build a single Vault-Tec reactor and 16 resource extractors (8 basic, 4 advanced, 2 premium, and 2 exotic). Each extractor provided a single unit of raw material type every five minutes. It took two pieces of raw material to refine into a single useable component, so the math worked out just under 144 units of useful material every 24 hours per extractor. 

That might not sound like a lot, but each refined unit was an ingot or chunk that weighed several pounds. It was more than enough to meet our current needs and demands of the foreseeable future. It was also self-replicating since the refined materials could be invested back into making more machinery.

There were also two types of harvesters, one for plants and another for animals. I'm not sure how it worked, but the animal one could produce bone and leather, while the plant created wood and plant fiber. The crafting materials were wood and bones/leather, which I had plenty of after scraping a few animal corpses. These didn't have placement limitations, so I made a few in the vault in case I needed a stockpile of natural resources.

Once I finished checking on the last machine, I placed it down and confirmed that everything was working as intended. I exited the settlement builder and started returning to the central atrium. The Vault was now eerily quiet without all the fighting. It was also considerably emptier since I broke down anything I could with the Scrap Everything mod-enhanced settlement builder. Diggers, lifts, shelves, forklifts, cones, hell, I even scrapped the train cars and rails in the train yard. 

Speaking of the train yard. After getting rid of every little piece of equipment in the yard, I also started clearing out the tunnels. What shocked me was when I scraped the cave-in rubble for concrete, the tunnel opened up and showed an actual train system behind it. That definitely wasn't in the game, but it makes sense since there has to be a real train system for all of these train cars and materials to get here in the first place.

There were more cave-ins further down that I couldn't get rid of because it was outside of the settlement builder range, so I couldn't see where they led. Regardless, clearing those tunnels out might solve my other big problem: Transportation.

It didn't matter how many resources I had if I couldn't get it to where I needed it. At first, I thought having Isabel make robot convoys to carry the materials might work, but that would be spotted too quickly and make finding Vault 88 very simple. Then I thought maybe sneaking it onto a boat and shipping it to the lair could work, but the ocean was unsecured, and our ability to create and maintain ships was a big question mark.

An underground train system could provide both a secure and covert route to supply our base of operations. Considering that Vault 88's experiments were supposed to be distributed to the rest of the vaults, there could be a chance that the tunnels would lead to Vault 114, which was only a hop and a step away from Isabel's lair.

While pondering logistics, I found myself in the central atrium, where the train yard used to be. I found Tanya in the center, sitting on a chair next to a desk surrounded by three of her Radscorpions. I watched as she said something to them, and a few moments later, all three radscorpions spread their legs out and lay on their belly, almost like a dog being told to lie down.

Tanya was seemingly excited at what they did and giggled and clapped a bit before tossing each scorpion a dandy boy apple.

"Are you... training them?"

When I got within earshot, I asked Tanya what in the world she was doing. Turning around and seeing that it was me, Tanya put away the rest of the box of apples and told the scorpions to leave. The scorpions obeyed and skittered into one of the caverns to do whatever scorpions do.

"Nah, I was just checking how specific my commands could get." 

I walked over and pulled out a chair for myself near a cooking station I crafted. Most of the work I've done in the vault was to make the resource collectors, but I also put a little effort into making a small living area for when anyone from our group might have to crash here. It wasn't much, just some vault floors, a few beds, some lamps, a few sets of chairs, the cooking station, and a couple of tables.

"Before now, when I talked to ants, it was with general ideas like thinking of images of what I want them to do. That took a lot of focus, and the ants sometimes would interpret my orders incorrectly, but with the scorpions, it's different. What's that?"

Tanya stopped her thought when she saw me pull some mirelurk meat from my inventory and cram it into the cooking station. A menu popped up with options on what food items I could craft. We gave most of the animals we killed to the Radscorpions so they could grow and reproduce, but I decided to harvest and save the meat from the Mirelurk Queen for ourselves.

After breaking down the giant crab, I got so much meat that I had to invest my last perk point into the Strong Back perk to be able to carry it. Considering I still had my power armor, it was an impressive amount of meat. Definitely a lot more than what you could loot from corpses in the game world.

"Don't mind me. I figured we could use some of that Mirelurk Queen meat for dinner."

"Ohhh, Mirelurk Queen steak. Now that's luxury."

"Continue with what you were doing with those radscorpions. I'm interested in hearing what you learned."

"Hmm? Oh! Sure. Where was I? That's right, the ideas."

Tanya must have been hungry because it took her a moment to get back on track.

"I don't know if the scorpions are more intelligent or I'm getting better at using my gift, but when we were fighting, it felt like I had to focus less and could talk more clearly with them. When you walked in, that was just me seeing if I could give them discreet tasks and if they'd do it. So far, it seems that's the case."

When Tanya finished explaining what she was doing, I finished crafting the first Mirelurk Queen steak and began the process on the second one.

"Hmm. I guess it's good that you can communicate better with the scorpions. I'd also be interested to see if it's because they're smarter or you're getting more powerful. Could be both as well."

Right as I said that, the cooking system notified me that I completed the second steak and that it was deposited in my inventory. Stepping away from the cooking station, I dragged my chair over to Tanya's and took out the two finished meals. Taking the steaks from my inventory, I placed one on each side of the desk.

The steak, if you could call it that, looked like a giant piece of lobster. The meat was flaky and looked incredibly juicy, with that vague seafood smell. Tanya was drooling at this point, and she dug in as soon as I handed her some silverware I pulled out of my inventory. From the voices she made and the satisfied look on her face, it seemed like whatever the cooking station concocted was pretty damn good.

I poked my fork into it and cut off a bite before putting it in my mouth and carefully chewing it. It was a bit chewy, but the meat pulled apart like regular crab once you bit into it. There was a bit of sweetness and a surprising amount of spice. The best part, however, was the juice explosion from every bite. While it wasn't the best thing I've ever had, it was leagues ahead of everything else if we were limited to what I've eaten in this world. If I had some butter, this would easily be a top tier dish even in my past life.

The two of us quickly wolfed down our steaks and rounded out our meal with some ice-cold Nuka Cola I had stored in my inventory. Having a full stomach after a day of hard work and fighting tuckered one out, Tanya and I were both ready for bed after finishing our dinner. 

We got out of our clothes and dove under the covers together. Tanya snuggled up into me, her head on my chest and a pleased smile on her face. As I was about to drift off into dreamland, I heard a beeping noise in the distance that just got louder and louder. Looking at the noise source, I saw an Outrider speeding over from the entrance to the vault to our location. Tanya's cute face scrunched up before she could ignore the sound any longer, and sat up in frustration.

"There's always something, isn't there?"

The Outrider slowed down when it neared us before coming to a halt and hovering a few feet from the bed.

"Basil and Tanya Christoff identified. Urgent message from administrator Isabel Cruz. Would you like to start the live connection?"

Tanya and I looked at each other, confused about why Isabel needed to talk to us directly. Whatever it was, it was important, so I gave the Outrider the go-ahead. The connection went through after some radio white noise, and Isabel came through on the other end.

"Hello? Basil? Tanya? You guys there?"

"Yeah, we were about to go to bed, but Tanya and I hear you loud and clear. What's up?"

"Finally! That vault must be much bigger than I expected because I couldn't get a good connection to the Outriders you took with you. I had to send out a few of my own to serve as extra relays to get the signal out there."

Huh. I guess that makes sense. I can't imagine it's easy to get whatever signal the robots use to get a good connection this far underground.

"Anyway, sorry about waking you up but I have something important. An alien spaceship might have just crashed near the old Beantown Brewery."

Huh?