This is part four of the Vault Dweller's Diary series. If you haven't been reading this series, I suggest you click the link on the right-hand side (that reads Vault Dweller's Diary) and start with Vault Dweller's Diary Introduction or Monday, August 20th, 2277 if you feel up to diving in. Otherwise, click below to read!
Looking back at the events of the past few days, I can say this much with certainty: I kept Moira happy.
As fortune would have it, when I was in my bomb defusing trance on Thursday, I didn’t notice my Geiger counter trying to warn me that I was soaking up rads like a Ghoul’s nadgers. She had said that she’d wanted me to get irradiated for her Wasteland Survival Guide, but I don’t know if she’d wanted me quite so glowing.
I woke up on Friday, vomiting. At first, I thought it was just the previous night’s experiences come back to haunt me. But when I ran my hand through my hair, a clump of the stuff stayed there, along with more than a little skin. Panicked, I ran to Moira. She turned her own counter on me, and it sounded like ten-thousand tiny gnats playing the maracas. I’d apparently soaked up in excess of 600 rads. She was so excited to examine the effects that she barely stopped to talk to me before she broke out the equipment. An hour of tiresome questions and measurements with questionably clean instruments later, she gave me some kind of shot and a glass of Brahmin milk (those two-headed cows that seem to have replaced the single-headed variety). The shot felt warm in my veins. The milk was nice and cold, and tasted kind of nutty. It didn’t take long for me to start feeling better.
The worst of it was yet to come, as it turns out. When I asked Moira how I was, she hesitantly replied that I had developed a “slight mutation” as a result of my exposure. Apparently, during the course of the exam, she “slipped” with a scalpel and cut my arm. Funny thing is, I didn’t even notice, as the cut healed itself in a matter of seconds. I just tried it again myself, and it didn’t work. Guess I need to be irradiated for it to work. Well, Moira gave me a nice bonus to say “sorry for twisting up your DNA like a kitten with a ball of string.” It’s surprisingly easy to imagine a Moira-kitten all tangled up in string.
The shot she gave me apparently flushed the radiation from my system and put me well on the path to recovery, but due to the severity of my exposure, I still wasn’t 100% yesterday. I spent the day in my new house, taking it easy. My Mr. Handy is named Wadsworth and, like the whole line, he’s been given a snobby British accent. However, despite his obnoxious tone, I’ve grown to like having him around. He’s a lot more stable than that psycho-bot Andy, and he can generate purified water fro me on command (a comfort when I was recovering from radiation sickness). He also tells some truly abyssmal jokes. I think his programmers fished them out of a pre-war pun book. Every once in a while, he’ll refuse to tell a joke on the grounds that his “humor emitter array requires recharging.” I think that’s supposed to be a joke, too; I have no idea what a humor emitter would be, much less why he would need an array of them.
The upshot of taking yesterday off was that it gave me time to proces everything. According to Moriarty’s file on Dad, he went to the Galaxy News Radio station. I’ve been listening to the station for a while, and Three Dog seems to have confirmed that he met my father. Moira’s maps show the station being smack in the middle of downtown. As it stands right now, I have neither the experience nor the equipment necessary to make it through that area. It is apparently an all-out warzone full of raiders and Super Mutants. I need time to get some survival experience and some better equipment, and from where I’m sitting, the best way to do that right now is to help Moira write this guide of hers. I’ll learn about the Wasteland during my exploits, and she’s been promising me some pretty nice tech for helping her.
She’s excited about the prospect of me helping her. I think the first thing I’m going to do is follow up this lead in the Super-Duper Mart to the northeast of Megaton. Jericho tells me it’s likely to be swarming with raiders, so I traded some of the stuff I scavved for some 5.56 ammo and Stimpaks (a wondrous invention, basically adrenaline and blood plasma in a syringe). Tomorrow, I set out for the Super-Duper Mart; tomorrow, I take my first step toward finding Dad. Here’s to hoping.
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