“Skitzo-what? Stop using made-up words!”

“Schizophrenia. It's the disease that your fellow Nightkin suffer from. I can treat the symptoms easily, but a full cure will take a dedicated medical facility. I can make one, but I need you to move your friends out of the building first,” Franklin said.

“You can fix headaches and loud voices? How?” Davidson asked demandingly. The Nightkin was very high-strung. This made Franklin consider how badly the others might be affected by their disease if this was reasonable in Davidson's mind. Perhaps this Antler was a stabilizing force, It might also be the only reason he could have a conversation without attacking Franklin.

“I can make a treatment to help alleviate some serious symptoms. For a full cure, I would need to repair the damaged nerves and glands in your brain that have been affected by the Stealth Boy. There is enough material in this building to get started on a lab dedicated to this process but you can guess my problem with that,” Franklin said.

“The Ghouls! We can wipe them out!” Davidson screamed before he got quiet and looked at the cow skull on the table. “Ugh, fine Antler. You need us to leave so the Ghouls can do their thing. But what then?”

“The Ghouls aren’t going to stay. They need to go through this basement so they can reach whatever it is they need for their journey. Once they get it, you all can move back in, and I can start setting everything up. Sound fair?” Franklin asked.

Davidson grunted. It wasn’t really an acknowledgment as he started to mumble to the skull. Franklin didn’t try and pry as he would only hear one side of the insane conversation with the voice in the Supermutants head.

Franklin started to think about what he was about to do. His journey through the wasteland has been a little slow and explorative. He left some seeds behind with the MRCS which he hopes will one day soon be the basis of his growing movement. He would spread his nanites across the wasteland draining radioactive pools, finding settlements, and connecting them to one another.

A fun little dream that is haunted by the things he will have to do. Caesar's Legion is supposedly made of thousands of conquered people forced into slavery or made to fight as legionnaires. It's not their armies that scare Franklin. It is what he might be forced to do to pacify them.

He always hated MAD doctrine. It was a defeatist mentality that relied on the other side being too afraid to die. This world proved that nukes and WMDs didn't work to stop the fall of society. Franklin was of the opinion that being too valuable to kill was the better alternative or if that failed, to be as resilient as a cockroach. He was quite fond of the latter option. It was what drove him to create the nanite conversion process.

But before the process, the only reason he stayed out of jail long-term was because world governments needed his tech. Few others could match his capabilities for the creation of innovative nanite software. Soldiers, farming swarms, deep space mining probes. You name it, Franklin built them with ease.

Franklin's skill would make defeating the Legion in open combat easy. He could release a single shell that would replicate until the land was stripped bare. Then it would walk across the Colorado River and wipe out the Legion. The problem was that you couldn't kill the Legion with force. It was a cult. A belief system.

Kill Caesar and his followers would raise him to the level of a god. Destroy Caesar's army and he would fall back and wait. In a generation or two another Legion would rise. Kill both and their message would still infect the minds of future generations. People with power would exploit their history, preying on the weak and helpless. The Legion would rise again, puppeteered by people born long after Caesar's death.

To defeat the Legion would take the work of generations. If Franklin didn't show people how and why they were wrong the belief would remain.

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Creating a utopia is an impossible goal.

But it isn't a worthless one.

Franklin just needed to help the survivors of this world stand on their own two feet so that they would one day create a society and culture free from the worries of survival in this harsh uncaring, unforgiving world. He will start by shoving his foot up the asses of those who do nothing but horde fucking toasters.

—

BUUURGH

BUUURGH

“All personnel! This is Elder McNamara. Evacuate immediately. This is not a drill. Evacuate immediately,” the Elder's voice came from the bunker's speaker system.

Every inhabitant of the Brotherhood bunker was scrambling. Scribes gathered research documents and technical manuals. Some ripped hard drives right from their Robco brand computers. Knights and their Squires grabbed weapons and ammo by the helmet full. They tore the sheets from every bed and used them to bundle up piles of guns.

Head Paladin Hardin barged into the command room. Elder McNamara was shouting at scribes to gather everything they could. “MCNAMARA! What is going on? Why are you ordering an evacuation?” Hardin screamed, a vein on his forehead bulging.

“The reactor is going critical. I have had Taggart, Schuler, and even Santangelo fucking check! They all said it is a self-destruction feature built into the bunkers system. Something called a Last Stand protocol. It can’t be stopped, so we are evacuating. We have one hour before it goes critical and leaks enough radiation into this bunker to kill even a mutant,” Elder McNamara said and got back to collecting important information from his terminal.

Hardin started sweating so much that his power armor activated its cooling fans. After half a minute he broke from his stupor and ran out of the room to give orders to his knights. This was this bunker's second darkest hour in the last few years. The first was when the former Elder Elijah nearly destroyed the Brotherhood because he was obsessed with destroying the NCR. He almost got all of the Brotherhood killed defending the ruin called Helios One. Hardin had hoped this bunker would be a second chance for his chapter to rise but it seemed the world had other plans.

The Brotherhood would endure this trial. Like all others, it has survived far worse than losing their home.

But Hardin could only ask, why now?

Knight Torres was the quartermaster of the bunker's armory. She has spent years maintaining, stockpiling, and organizing the retrieval and storage of actual tons of prewar weapons, machinery, and materials. And now that was coming back to bite her in the ass because there was no way to carry it all out of the bunker in under an hour. She estimated that at least 90% of it would have to be left behind.

She had to suck it up and get the things they will need the most. The scribes would bitch about getting the high-tech components like Pip-Boy parts and technical manuals. The Paladins would bitch about their favorite plasma weapons and power armor mods. They could all shove it. Torres knew what they were gonna need most was ammo and spare parts—food they could buy, steal, or find. Medicine could be made from planets, strong alcohol, and stimpacks were easily found. Spare screws and springs for guns though? How else were you gonna get those other supplies if some junkie with a loose trigger finger thinks your boots look nice? Or how about those pesky giant geckos? They see a knight in power armor and scream with glee about canned food.

So she ordered her soldiers to grab every ammo crate and box of parts they could. Let the scribes worry about their books and other shit, she had to think about them all living through the next two weeks.

“Move! Move! Move! Gather up on the south side of the valley,” a paladin yelled, ordering the traffic out of the base.

A scribe yelled out to his fellow scribes, “Why is the DERVISH storm still on? Shouldn’t that have been shut down so we can see where the fuck we are going!”

“Who knows? Maybe someone forgot to do it. Fuck, I forgot that book about planetary gravity”

“That is what you’re worried about scribe? I left behind a trunk of energy weapons carrying your shit!” A Paladin yelled.

“Oh god not again,” an initiate cried. They fell to the ground in a ball.

All of the Brotherhood was now here atop the ground that hid their bunker. The air was filled with sand, dust, and other particulates from the DERVISH system. It choked the air and made navigating the valley difficult. The Knights in power armor were used to navigating through the storm, so they led the unarmored squires, initiates, and scribes toward the western gate. Elder McNamara led from the front along with Hardin, Torres, and Taggart.

“Taggart! How long till the explosion?” McNamara yelled out.

“Two minutes Sir!”

“McNamara! Somethings wrong!” Hardin shouted.

“What is it?” McNamara replied.

“The gate is blocked. Some kind of metal tubing is holding it closed.”

They arrived to find the fence surrounding the valley had been reinforced. Metal poles spaced less than a foot from one another stretched the length of the fence from as far as they could see in the storm.

“It's a trap!” McNamara yelled!

All one hundred and twelve members of the Mojave Chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel watched in shock, horror, despair, and anger as the sand around them exploded in piles. Grey figures burst from the sand. First ten, then thirty, a hundred, two hundred. They were surrounded by a legion of shells.

The air became a storm of positive and negative charges causing electricity to arc across the valley. The air then vibrated as a booming voice rumbled through the ears of every living being.

“No Elder McNamara. This is a robbery.”