**Disclaimer, I’m awful with names, some may be incorrect or forgotten entirely. You get the gist**
Friday evening.
After arriving and settling into the base, members of bunker Victoria marched in to deliver our eviction notice personally. They read us their decree, and went back and forth with councillor Sally Fields, before leaving in a huff. Our drone tailed them, to find the Victorians had set up an encampment nearby where they launched an attack from soon after. All who attacked were killed.
Once the immediate threat of the Victorians had passed, a team left to meet with the friendly supermutants known as the Cutlery Clan. While the team was out, the rest of us guarded the base. After dark, a few members passed out simultaneously, and then a small earthquake rumbled the ground. Those who fell unconscious later reported they all felt like they were being pulled into a black hole.
A larger earthquake soon followed, strong enough to take some of us off our feet. Our expeditionary team returned with a new face. A large man in an early form of powered armour arrived by the name of Citadel. He spent the evening telling us his story, but the short version: he was a pre-fall soldier, placed in stasis around 2 years before the fall. The earthquake causes his cryopod to be unearthed, and that’s when our people found him. He searches for the rest of his team, failing that, some surviving authority that his faction and protocol recognises.
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Saturday.
Expedition 1 – Culling the Victorians.
While I was busy filling out paperwork, (who knew volunteering to shoot stuff on the surface came with so much admin?) our people went out to remove the snobby bailiffs from the lands surrounding our base. I hear it went well. They encountered a Victorian Knight. The cream of their crop, decked out in power armour that is impervious to any kind of attack from the front, but incredibly weak in the rear, encouraging their soldiers to not turn and run.
Expedition 2 – Supermutant herding.
Virtually all our heavy hitters leave after lunch to set up a firing line and draw in a vast herd of supermutants. The goal was to ring the dinner bell to draw them into the meat grinder. I remained at base with Citadel, Travis, Sally, and one or two others. Our guys are too good at killing things apparently, because despite how tough those bastard mutants are, they were dropping like flies, and the herding wasn’t going so well. In the end, half came towards us, and we wiped them out with no losses or serious injuries.
The other half went to the Dahl Institute though. Dahl came over the radio to inform us he was under attack, and despite his confidence in his doors, comms were lost within minutes.
Expedition 3 – Wakefield crater.
Present: Edward, Jacob, Travis ‘Sicknote’ and Pedro Brenner and myself from bunker Ascendant, Rav Marsh Backwater, Esab and Waking Fox of the tribes, and Crow from bunker Fortitude.
We journeyed to the crater with no issue besides some alpha radiation. We met some tribal people who mentioned a nearby holy site, which turned out to be a large lump of crystallised C7, which wasn’t safe to touch according to Esab.
Once we were deeper into the rad-zone, we came across a couple more tribals, who seemed scared and warned us not to go deeper in.
We began hearing whooping and other animal sounds like howling. The source turned out to be crazed tribals who attacked us. They were half starved, and suffering badly from radiation poisoning. We fought several groups of them, which weren’t too difficult to kill, they were far from stealthy.
We came across a tree with green and blue growths all over it, Edward took a sample and was briefly paralysed by the sap. Other strange plants were also growing in the area that I believe he scanned and sampled.
Soon after we reached a beta rad-zone. Edward, Pedro, Sicknote and Jacob all went in to investigate, being protected from the rads. They found the remains of some people, long dead, and collected some salvage. They found a padd which Esab later repaired and found a data entry describing some deadly creature that roams the area.
Seeing little else locally to investigate, we returned home unimpeded, ready to start rum night. Friends of the Pact arrived to share stories for the evening. I believe brother Phineas also turned up and mingled, but by that point I was busy.
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Sunday – Assault on Dr Richtofen’s lab.
All of us prepared to roll out and find out who was behind that message, and what scientific marvels were out there. All bar the few who had left their paperwork to the last minute, anyway.
Anthony Brenner took the lead, briefed us, ensured we were prepared, and decided on tactics for the day. We split into three groups, I was in the forward group with recons Billy and Riley ( Ducky 1&2), Elwood, Dex, Konrad, Crow, and Citadel. Our recon duo navigated us the long way to the base, avoiding dangers and anything that’d impede us. Dull maybe, but we got to enjoy the scenery without blowing through our ammo.
We found multiple locations tied to the Atlas project. Not a clue what it is, but our recon specialists marked the pinpoint locations using W3W.
As we neared the facility, we were attacked by many mutants. Some blood crazed ones that weren’t too difficult to put down, the butchers were another story. People weren’t exaggerating when they described those to me after their surface missions. 6-8 feet tall and all muscle, they could take more beating than any living thing should be able to live to tell about. You do NOT wanna get up close and personal with those guys. Unless you’re Fang or Anthony, anyway.
During the supermutant massacre, we lost one of our own, the great Elwood Brenner. His power armour vitals monitoring systems showed we were just 2 seconds too late to save him, and the emergency self destruct failsafe had been activated. May he rest in peace.
We took a brief pause to collect ourselves – to many on the team he was family – before pushing on.
After more supermutants, we reached a clearing. Across the way, we could see the facility surrounded by android looking things. We tried talking to them, but they opened fire. We put them down, and found them to be hive. After fighting countless hive drones that came from a chute at the back of the building, all seemed safe for a while.
The bunker’s finest engineers cracked the power supply issue to the elevator, and our hackers bypassed the systems so we could enter. The lift could hold 3 people, or 1 power armour wearer. 7 people went down initially, leaving myself, Ducky 1&2, Crow, Konrad and Scar on the surface in case something went wrong with the power again. We also didn’t all wanna go in to find more hive topside when there would only be 3 of us surfacing at a time.
We had a few more mutants filter out of the woodland, nothing we couldn’t handle. We began to run low on ammo, but we rationed ourselves well until Dex popped up to deliver us a fresh NDU. Not long after though, a Beta rad storm was incoming. We piled Scar, Konrad, and Crow into the lift first, and luckily myself and the Ducks were safely inside before the storm was on us.
I dunno what I expected awaited us inside, but it certainly wasn’t some Russki scientist in an ice box. I missed most of the chatter with him, but I’m told he was alive pre fall and put himself into stasis to extend his lifespan. He had a single hive servant with him called Gunter. He reprogrammed the thing to work for him, crazy bastard. I didn’t take many photos this sortie, but here’s one of the few:
Until next time,
Sergeant Hazard.