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Eve of Destruction 2073 Q4 Results Finale
🕑 Added 2024-03-16 21:54:43 +0000 UTCLobby (Fund National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) (752/500)
It takes some palm greasing, some financial concessions, and Joe blackmailing an independent media firm with some very compromising pictures of their CEO, but you manage to convince congress to fund the NOAA: most of your support for the move comes from the green wing of the Patriot Party, who argue that the NOAA could prove vital in protecting natural security by predicting storms, hurricanes, tsunamis, and other environmental disasters...And also General Chase, who shows up to personally argue in front of Congress the need to monitor the weather in case the Commies somehow figure out how to weaponize it.
By the end of the quarter, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gets a 32% budgetary increase, allowing the organization to expand massively, recruiting a large body of meteorologists and oceanographers to work as analysts…
And they have some bad news. They’ve crunched the numbers: when the bombs drop, not only will it render vast swathes of the earth dead, the radiation would likely be carried on the wind and coalesce in the upper atmosphere.
It wouldn’t just be the water that was poisoned, the very air that people breathed would be full of radioactive particulates. While this would likely be the most severe in the immediate decades after the bombs, it would likely be centuries in some areas before the amount of toxic elements in the atmosphere would settle entirely.
That’s the optimistic version the NOAA Meteorologists send you. The not so optimistic version, which you have to rob from NOAA headquarters annoyingly, mentions the possibility of regular radioactive ash rains encasing some areas in a crust of nuclear dust entirely. Superstorms capable of ending civilizations in their own right. There are mentions of a hypothetical ‘radstorm’ occurring: it’s at that point you stop reading and send the document to your team of analysts.
In other words, it’s not just the ocean currents and water cycle you need to be concerned with. The entire goddamn weather would be out to get you.
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Food Subsidies (Phase 2) (515/100) Phase 5 Complete.
Bad Seed (Phase 1) (865/400(800)) Phase 2 Complete
“DEPARTMENT OF PRESERVATION ANNOUNCES MASSIVE EXPANSION OF FOOD PROGRAM! CLAIMS THAT FIGHTING HUNGER VITAL TO WAR EFFORT!”- Charleston Herald
“DoP War Against Hunger Initiative: Patriotic attempt to solve national hunger, or scheming populist power grab? More details on page 11!” - Wallstreet Journal
“HEROIC DOP DIRECTOR ANNOUNCES END TO AMERICAN STARVATION WITH WAR AGAINST HUNGER INITIATIVE: GREEDY LIBERTY PARTY OFFICIALS SEETHING AT LOST PROFITS.” - Patriot Times
“DOP INITIATIVE SECRET NEXT PLOT? TURN TO PAGE 7 TO LEARN HOW THE WAR AGAINST HUNGER INITIATIVE IS ACTUALLY A CONSPIRACY TO CONSOLIDATE POLITICAL SUPPORT AND EXPAND NEXTS CONTROL OVER THE AGRICULTURE SECTOR!” - Conspiracy Monthly
As you expected, your efforts to mitigate the food crisis prove deeply unpopular. You get called a fascist. A populist. Hell, some among the Liberty Party outright accuse you of being an outright communist, out to collectivize agriculture and establish soviet agri-socialism. The only reason you don’t wind up getting fired for the War Against Hunger Initiative is the fact that you’re riding an obscene wave of popularity from the TAPP and said initiative. Approval ratings for the Department (and thus by extension, the approval numbers for YOU) with the average American put you at higher numbers than the president right now, especially with the Patriot Party, who opt to swerve, supporting the subsidies and acquisitions and putting them in direct opposition to the Liberty Party: the President himself puts out a speech talking about the need for every able bodied worker to be fed in order to help the war effort even as the man who ran against him in the last election ranted on radio about state overreach and comparing you to Hitler, a comparison that alarmingly causes your approval rating to rise in several states.
It was not an exaggeration to say that a lot of people fucking loved you at the moment: people were actually eating well for once, the price of food plummeting. Most of the subsidies went to small farmers, fuelling the Farmers United and allowing the organization to expand. Two birds, one stone.
Still, you weren’t untouchable: this was the kind of normally career killing move you could honestly only pull off once: TAPP or no TAPP, a lot of very powerful people were very, very pissed with you right now, and frankly, you were probably going to get your budget slashed for this. Felton even sends you a letter warning you in the same blunt tone you had come to expect from the woman to not try pulling this sort of stunt again: if you pissed off her donors she’d make sure to bury you.
You make note of her threat and throw the letter into the incinerator.
What most people didn’t realize was that the whole thing was a smokescreen: people were eating well, but only a select group of people. The sort of people the Patriots considered THEIR type of people: able bodied, working class and, in most states, mostly white. The subsidies lowered prices, but it didn’t matter how low food prices were when you didn’t have any money anyways, meaning communities that had low employment rates were still, sadly, fucked.
Didn’t even help the farmers, really: the projections showed that even with your subsidies, small farming was still liable to be deeply unprofitable, a problem exacerbated by the fact that as the Farmers United got money and funding from the Subsidies, they still were losing their homes and livelihoods as the Department and various NEXT affiliates scooped up farms and agricultural assets through eminent domain, predatory loans, fraud, or, in some cases, careful inhuming. In practical terms, your subsidies program was a bandaid on a gaping wound: massively insufficient to accomplish it’s actual goals.
But the important part was that it LOOKED like you were helping: even as the situation deteriorated, the subsidies bought you valuable public relations and kept eyes off your more underhanded actions: instead of investigating a wave of farmers dying and leaving their homes to the Department, they wind up investigating the amount of money you pump into the corn industry. Instead of being suspicious about the tractor manufacturer that suddenly goes under and gets bought out by a NEXT shell company, they cheer because you opened a new subsidized grocery store in their district. Instead of being alarmed at the mass purchase of AgriStocks by the Department, they’re staring at the dairy herds funded by government action.
Just the way you liked it.
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DoP Civil Psionic Program (Phase 1: South) (210/200)
DoP Civil Psionic Program (Phase 1: Pacific) (219/200)
Capping off the year was the completion of JAKARTA and its sister school in Hawaii, referred to internally as ACHERON. Publicly, these facilities are named the Professor Haskell School for Gifted Psychics and Camp Itchy Boot.
The former is your poster facility: sure, it’s surrounded by barbed wire fences, armed guards, attack dogs, and anti-air emplacements, but it’s still a very photogenic facility: a wide, sprawling campus with apartment style dorms large enough to house small families, a cafeteria capable of serving several hundred people all throughout the day, a large library and gym, and of course extensive class-rooms and training facilities.
In essence, it was everything you wanted put on a magazine. Every bit of material you put out for the Program had been Haskell: when you made the announcement, it had been at Haskell. When you put out pictures for magazines, it had been Haskell buildings. When you permitted tours and inspections, it had been on Haskell grounds.
Haskell was where you’d be sending the willing volunteers, the people you could turn into psychic posterchildren. With that in mind, it was everything a psychic needed to hone their powers in relative comfort and make the program look good.
Itchy Boot meanwhile was the reverse. Every psychic you had to pressgang into the DoP, the ones that didn’t look good on magazine covers, the sort of psychics that would cause problems, they got sent to Camp Itchy Boot, located on a small, rocky patch of dirt on the lonely sea, far from any shipping routes. One part military academy, one part university, one part boot camp, psychics sent to Itchy Boot would be rigorously trained physically and mentally in order to meet the DoP’s need for psychic manpower.
Of course, the announcement of real, genuine psychics to the public meant that any deniability you had was out the window. Still, it takes some time for media to pick up on it: at first, most mainstream publications assume it’s a hoax, a prank someone concocted: psychics? Real, genuine spoonbenders? The only reporters who don’t assume someone is having a goof are the ones that work for conspiracy rags, the sort that talk about Zetans, the secret cabal in control of the government, Ug-Qualtoth, and all other nutso crap you find in tabloids. .
…Note to self, put a team on the Zetans. At any rate, this doesn’t last long: a week after the announcement, your office landline has to be unplugged from how many people keep trying to contact you. After that, they start cracking jokes: some snot nosed journo from Appalachia digs up documents referencing your cryptid project, which doesn’t help matters. For the next week, on the late night talkshows, on the radio news programs, in the newspapers, all they talk about is how the DoP employs, can you believe this, an organization of official ghost hunters and psychic weirdos?
As the Department keeps demonstrating, over and over, the hard, concrete proof they’ve assembled, the trained psychics capable of discerning hidden secrets or even minor feats like lifting pebbles, however, the laughs…stop. That’s when the questions begin in earnest: how long has the Department known about this? What exactly can these psychics do? Are they a threat to normal human beings? Why aren’t they being used by the military? And most importantly, if the Government has access to psychics, why couldn’t they stop the Arlington Bombing?
Some, you can answer. Some, you obfuscate, using the shadow of national security to provide an easy way out. Some you merely point out aren’t your jurisdiction: the DoP isn’t a law enforcement or national security agency, why on earth would you expect the people whose job primarily consists of public works to prevent the worst attack on american soil since Pearl Harbour? And some, you have to take care of in other, much more final ways: regrettable, but a few reporters with a spine strong enough to make them unbribable wind up digging a bit too deep.
Of course, reporters aren’t the only group with questions. You briefly find yourself hauled before a committee of congresspeople who find themselves deeply irate with your announcement. Unfortunately, they don’t have the ammo to fire you: you’re still coming down from the TAPP and Anti-Hunger initiatives and they can’t agree on any particular misstep you made: the closest they can come to is accusations of violating national security by announcing the existence of psychics to the public and ensuring they couldn’t be covertly deployed against China, and their evidence and, more importantly, political support is weak enough that you skate by with a slap on the wrist.
Meanwhile, you were very, VERY pleased with the results of the program going online: not only had regional projections for Hawaii and Appalachia both improved, the DoP now had a steady stable of psychic recruits to man the Psi Division. The Camp Boot trainees would get transferred to the SPD’s in Hawaii if they were deemed sufficiently competent where they would serve as a psychic labour core for the region after the bombs dropped, whereas the Haskell Academy alumni had a direct pipeline to the DoP Logistics Management Division in Appalachia, where they’d be put to work figuring the best way to optimize department-affiliated industry in the region for post-nuclear survival. In other words, the group of psychics you rated as more likely to survive were given conditions juuuuuust bad enough for the anti-government actors in the SPD’s to take advantage.
The ones in your logistics department meanwhile were probably going to get at least somewhat vaporized. The DoP headquarters in the region, along with that of Haskell Academy, were public knowledge, and you doubted the Chinese would hesitate to wipe both off the map, even if you doubted they’d be major priorities. As some degree of recompense, you make sure to give said Psi-Logistics Agents a steep paycheck: if they were going to be sacrificed, might as well make sure their last few years are pleasant enough.
[Spoiler=The Final Neurospecialist]
And so the course of history in the pacific twisted once more, all starting at Strategic Supply Depot 1-1. In the immediate decades after the bombs dropped, 1-1 found itself locked away from the world, isolated by a sea of radioactive water, trapped.
This was, however, expected: the residents knew when they had entered the government vault that it would likely be decades before the radiation faded enough for them to venture from their new home. And yet, in the decades after, the residents of 1-1 quickly found their home to be nothing less than a prison, as paranoia, claustrophobia, and absolute isolation set it, causing a mutiny against the SPD’s Director that ended with the man flushing an entire wing of the vault, killing one hundred and thirty seven people, men, women, and children, all to restore ‘order’. In the aftermath, harsh anti-mutiny laws were passed by the Director, quickly seizing power in the name of preserving humanity. Those who stayed in line would be treated well. Those who showed insubordination would be punished by solitary confinement, corporal punishment, and even death by exile.
In order to protect his power, he would marshal the psychics of the Vault, forming the Neurospecialist Corp. In exchange for preferential treatment, they would serve as the Directors agents, using their power to ensure every member of the Vault obeyed and helping to root out seditious action by using their mental powers to breach the mind of suspected mutineers: those deemed potentially treasonous would be subjected to reconditioning via electroshock therapy to cure them of whatever mental disease caused their disloyalty.
It was in this prison that the Final Neurospecialist was born, fifty years before the Water Seeker began her journey. The child of a researcher and another member of the Corp, the Final Neurospecialist was a fairly powerful psychic who spent much of their early life studying to become a Psi-Researcher much like their parent.
Such an event would never come to pass. On their 21st birthday, the Neurospecialist found themselves called up by the Director: the radiation had faded enough to begin traversing the outside of the vault, and preliminary exploration had uncovered something interesting: a pathogen, mutagenic, that seemed to be corrupting the local region around the SPD, making it…unsuitable for reclamation, to say the least.
This was, of course, of deep concern to the Director. His mission for the Neurospecialist was simple: their above average psychic potential meant that they were perfect to survive the harsh world above and uncover information about the blight and protect against it. To this end, the Neurospecialist would be given their own bathysphere and sent to explore.
Reticently, knowing refusal wasn’t an option, the Final Neurospecialist agreed, setting out through the irradiated sea: their first lead was Vault 131, supposedly a medical research facility created by Vault Tec. Perhaps if they still existed, they would have the tools and knowledge to help create a countermeasure. Unfortunately, it’s precise location was unknown, a casualty of the mutiny: to find the research Vault, the Neurospecialist would have to venture to Makapipi Falls and locate the Data Hub hidden within.
.
Sailing under that sea, the Neurospecialists only way to defend their weaponless bathysphere against the beasts that stalked the sea was their own psychic potential, used to mentally deter potential predators that approached. This did not make the journey, huddled and helpless against every passing beast, trapped in a tiny tin can of a vehicle, any less terrifying.
It was only when they washed ashore that they learned to their dismay that the island had been completely sterilized by lethal amounts of radiation, swarming with thousands upon thousands of feral ghouls. Creeping through the dead island, the Neurospecialist stuck to stealth: after all, only a maniac would willingly attempt to fight so many ghouls, even if they had heavy weaponry, which the Neurospecialist did not.
Reaching Makapipi Falls and using Department of Preservation access codes, they successfully uploaded to their Pip-Buddy a copy of the map within: the location of all major DoP holdings…along with data on something called the Bio-Optimizer Pathogen, stored en mass at a location known as Fort Lanai.
Well, the good news was, it was on the way. Before they left the Hub, the Neurospecialist would take the time to perform maintenance on the facility, performing various repairs in order to extend its operation time and keep it in good condition for those who might use it in the future. The next day, they would return to their Bathysphere, setting off through the sea once again…
Only for their Bathysphere to be seized by a clan of Wreckers. These vault descended pirates would kidnap the Neurospecialist, putting them to work as a doctor for their ship crew by the Captain, Arbuckle, patching them back together after every raid and every stormed ship. In that tense month, the Neurospecialist desperately attempted to puzzle a means of escape, carefully gathering supplies and information in order to escape Arbuckle and the Wreckers. However, before this could be done, the psi-operative finally came face to face with the Drowned.
A raid gone bad, Captain Arbuckle growled as the First Mate and Bosun dragged in what had once been a Wrecker, and was now, before their eyes, becoming…something else. Accidental injection of saturated megavirus was causing rapid mutation. The ship had been overrun with mutated, cancerous Urchioids. The Wrecker Captain was grim as he told the doctor that at least twelve other crew had been exposed, if less severely.
For a moment, the Neurospecialist hesitated: this was an opportunity, a way to get free of the Captain. If the condition was allowed to progress, the Neurospecialist could set the Wreckers against their infected kin…
And yet, as they stared at the twisting form of the crewmate, feeling his consciousness devoured from the inside out by the virus, the Neurospecialist found themselves lacking the will to do it. Caving, they informed the Captain of what they knew of the virus and agreed to try and treat his men and, should nothing be done, help put them out of their misery.
In the end, only a small handful of the infected crew would survive, those with only mild exposure: the crew had lacked access to the medicine that might have helped more significantly, leaving the Neurospecialist to work with only some Stim-Packs, Boost, and a few antibiotics. No antivirals, no immunoboosters, nothing that might actually help treat the pathogen with any effectiveness. Still, it was better than nothing, even if the survivors would become withdrawn and strange afterwards.
Captain Arbuckle was grateful at least, agreeing to free the Neurospecialist and transport them to Ft. Lanai, if only because they recognized the potential severity of the Blight. Dropping them and their Bathysphere off, Arbuckle had generously opted to grant the Neurospecialist a few weapons: a harpoon gun for their Bathysphere and a Plasma Flintlock. Going forward, he would warn his fellow pirates and raiders: should you come across a ship blighted or infected animal, kill it. While the Wreckers would never be organized enough to mount a coordinated defense against the Drowned, individually Wreckertowns would develop a vicious understanding of how to attack at the plagued that might encroach on their territory.
Just like the mainland, Lanai was also covered in ghouls. Once more, the Neurospecialist would find themselves sneaking past them…only to get ambushed when some of those ghouls had guns.
They weren't the only person who had come looking for Ft. Lanai. Out of the Wrecker Frying Pan, into the New Alcatraz Exiles Fire. The remnants of Vault Tec Loyalists, New Alcatrazians whose crimes in the old world were too horrible to forgive, and those who clashed with the enigmatic leaders of the island-state, the Exiles weren’t numerous, but they made up for it in meanness, having come to the Island in hopes of raiding its armory to attack and overthrow the gangs of New Alcatraz.
Well, it was a good thing she had been given a weapon. The firefight had been brief, the Neurospecialist only taking out a few Ghouls before being forced to retreat and return to stealth, the sounds of combat bringing forth the feral ghouls of the island, providing a handy distraction for the Neurospecialist, who continued to the heart of the island, using their codes to enter the fort at it’s center. Grabbing a shotgun, some ammo, and the parts to make a torpedo launcher for their Bathysphere, they then reached the cold storage room where the bio-optimizer was located, locked away behind special DoP access codes. Only having a small amount of space for the substance in their pack, the Neurospecialist would carry with themselves out of the Fort ten vials…and, of course, an extra for their own use, leaving the rest for whoever might come in the future seeking the substance.
In the future, this would allow the Water-Seeker to use these vials as bargaining chips in order to secure allies such as a few of the Wreckertowns and favors in her war against the Drowned, as well as provide her and her comrades some degree of resistance against the plague.
As the Final Neurospecialist left, passing by the remains of the Exiles, having been overwhelmed by the ferals of the island, the Neurospecialist noted a number of the feral ghouls milling about the island had concerning mutations. It seems the Blight had reached the island: within a few decades, if nothing was done, every feral ghoul would be infected. It would take additional time, but the Neurospecialist found themselves morally obligated to cull the infected ghouls, ensuring that Ft. Lanai would remain uninfected, hopefully forever. Much like with unlocking the Cold-Storage Room, this would send forth reverberations: the feral ghouls of the island would remain uninfected for longer, meaning that when from the waves rose the Leviathan, they would not fight alone: the waves of infected that rose from the shore were met with an army of angry feral ghouls crashing against that wave. While they were no ally to the Water Seeker, the drowned and their titan had consumed more of their attention, leaving the Water Seeker to act as fire support and artillery. The fight had lasted 9 hours.
A few days and many, many dead infected ghouls later, the Neurospecialist would once more clamber into their Bathysphere, setting off to Vault 131, finally reaching their destination. Injecting themselves with Bio-Optimizer while they journey, the next few days were spent with the Neurospecialist convalescent, feverish, and delirium filled as the Bio-Optimizer worked its way through their blood and bone, altering them on a genetic level.
When they awoke, they were stronger, healthier, BETTER. Definitely something the Director would appreciate. When they reached the Vault, however, this did little to help her, as the vault was flooded, and it’s inhabitants…
Mutated. Strange crosses between pelagic creature and human being, these Fishmen were aggressive and coordinated. The Bathysphere wasn’t suitable for this: too large, too unmanueverable. If the Neurospecialist was going to sneak past the Fishmen, they would have to figure out an alternate method.
Returning to their home, they would leave with the Director most of the Bio-Optimizer vials, keeping a handful to trade with, informing him of what the Final Neurospecialist had learned, the Directors ire at the many delays the Neurospecialist had undertaken mollified somewhat by the intel and samples they had obtained during the journey.
“Those ghouls had talked about a place known as New Alcatraz,” He had commanded. “Go there: see if you can find out anything about these Fishmen and how to get past them.”
And so they went, having to dispatch a few hostile beasts here and there using their torpedoes and their rocket launcher in the path between the SPD and the vault-prison, eventually washing up to the Commie Block Docks. New Alcatraz: the city of ghouls,a sprawling shanty constructed from duracrete foundations and metal bulkheads. Even after the radiation had been cleaned away, few unghoulified humans made residence in the city-state: most of its inhabitants were the original prisoners of the vault and the handful of Vault Tec administrators they had allowed to remain.
In her search for one of these mostly reviled ghouls, the Neurospecialist would fall in with Dean and the Dominos, a group of ghoulified jazz musicians and celebrity impersonators who apparently knew the location of a doc who might know what’s going on with the Vault, guy who worked in the medical division of Vault Tec back in the day, did their organ harvesting for them on dead inmates. Cut em open, put em in a box, take em to Vault 131. Only reason he hadn’t seen the rope was the fact that he had seen which way the wind was gonna go when the revolt happened and switched sides first, providing the prisoners medical aid during and after the revolt to buy their safety. If there was any guy who knew anything about 131, it’d be the Doc.
All Dean and the Dominos wanted in exchange was for the Neurospecialist to sneak into the home of a rat fink who had sold them out to the wardens back in the day and give him the whack. Do that, and the Dominos would hand over the location. Reticently, the Neurospecialist agreed: they didn’t have the time to waste with the moral path, having wasted too much already.
The mission came first. The Neurospecialist would break into the Finks house, smothering him in his sleep with a pillow after manuevering around their surprisingly extensive security: it appeared their target was well aware they had enemies, though it didn’t save them, the ancient informant only realizing something was wrong when they woke up in the middle of the night unable to draw breath, their thrashing slowly fading as they suffocated. And so for their act of assassination on behalf of Dean and the Dominos the Neurospecialist got the location of the Doc, living on a hut near the shore: he knew that he weren’t welcome no more ‘round civilized company, y’dig? Not if he wanted to keep his shins: the psychic would have to go to him.
Venturing to that hut, located near the rocky shore, the Neurospecialist came face to face with the Doc, a bitter old wretch of a ghoul who nonetheless answered the Neurospecialists questions: after all, the Neurospecialist had a gun and the Doc wasn’t stupid and ‘sides, buying favors could be his ticket back into polite society.
Vault 131 had been the testing ground for FEV, a mutagenic virus, he told the psychic explorer. They (who ‘they’ were was left unsaid) had required the human tissue for biological testing: not much, but whenever a prisoner of Alcatraz kicked the bucket before the bombs dropped, the Doc had been expected to transport a boats worth of organs. The Doc hadn’t been high enough in the totem pole to receive much in the way of details, but it didn’t take a genius to figure the fishmen were likely the result of said testing, as was likely the Drowned: it didn’t take much to put two and two together, after all.
The Docs suggestion for entering 131 was acquiring a mild version of the fishman contagion: it only damaged cognition at high levels of saturation, and unlike the Drowned, would only progress with sustained contact. At low levels of infection, it could give heightened resistance to radiation and, more saliently, gills, making it the best option for accessing the facility. Long term, it would probably fuck the Neurospecialist up something fierce, but frankly that wasn’t the Docs problem now, was it?
The problem was acquisition: to obtain the infection, one had to consume a great deal of tainted fish, a process that would take far too much time: simply procuring the meat would be prohibitively time-consuming.
The best way to acquire the Fishman infection at a reasonable pace was by ingesting Fishman Blood. The bad news was, rare was the sailor willing to traffic in the substance: superstitious bunch, sailors were, especially when it came to Fishmen. The good news was, New Alcatraz was the best place to look for a vial of the stuff: this or Ventropolis.
And indeed, the Neurospecialist would shortly find someone with what they needed: a merchant from Ventropolis, willing to trade three vials of the ichory substance in exchange for some of their BioOptimizer.
Injecting themselves, the next few nights were spent in a feverish haze, until the Neurospecialist awoke, possessed of the two tools they required. With their modifications, they would return 131, and enter it, learning the dark truth behind the Fishman plague, the product of the US government attempting to turn the forced evolutionary virus to create next generation agriquatics gone horribly wrong.
At first they found nothing to indicate the origin of the Drowned virus, however: as much as the Neurospecialist might have hoped otherwise, it seemed that the facility had nothing to do with the other contagion…
Until, on a barely working terminal located in an unflooded vault warehouse, they discovered a manifest, one attached to a complaint: some of the FEV that had been bound for the research vault had accidentally found itself re-routed elsewhere. One of the cities that had existed before the bombs: an artificial, floating one, created by the ACME corporation: the bombs had dropped right after Vault Tec had discovered their location, before the massive batches of mutagenic megavirus could be retrieved.
It was a lead, at least. Leaving the vault, the Neurospecialist would note the fishmen more passive, as if their infection had triggered some sort of switch in them: instead, their exit was plagued by a more mundane hazard, radiation. Lacking the more advanced radiotrophic abilities of more progressed pelagic mutates, the psychic was only radiation resistant, and the extreme conditions of the vault would tax them to the very limits and beyond, the poor psychic dragging themselves to their bathsphere, forced to spend the next several days chugging near-toxic amounts of RadAway, enough that combined with their radiation poisoning they spent the next several days convalescent.
A few days later, they washed up at their destination: ACME City. They had expected to see a ruined, irradiated wreckage of a city, or perhaps one overgrown by the mysterious virus they were attempting to eradicate. Instead, they found a city: one plagued by peril and misfortune, but still broadly functional. However, not all was well: a few days of asking questions about the forced evolutionary virus would eventually see the Neurospecialist the victim of an assassination attempt, ambushed by some of the older residents of the city who had deemed the Neurospecialists questions unfortunate.
Barely surviving, the Neurospecialist was forced to flee, ran into hiding. What their attackers had failed to realize however is that had they left alone, eventually the Neurospecialist would have found no lead, and eventually would be forced to move on. Now, however, the psychic had options. Creeping their way across the city, avoiding assassins, they trailed one of them until the psychics intended target was isolated, counter ambushing them and using their abilities to force the man to speak.
He would be compelled to tell the Water Seeker that, once, they had had a much larger ghoul population, and that the FEV batch had indeed been sent to ACME Pacific, but he would swallow his tongue before more was learned, choosing death over the truth.
It was something, at least: the correlation between ghouls and FEV was unknown, but that the man had made it at all meant it at least existed. Before the Neurospecialist could leave, however, she found herself contacted by an unknown party, one who had somehow managed to access their Pip-Buddy’s communications, bidding the Neurospecialist come to the abandoned ACME Regional Headquarters, located deep in the heart of ACME City, deep underwater.
Creeping their way into the facility, the Neurospecialist found it swarming with robots: mostly ACME and DoP models retrofitted for security purposes. Guided by the voice on her radio, she made her way through the vast labyrinth of laboratories, offices, workshops, supply closets, and lounges until they found their destination: ACME Entertainment Labs, where they would meet the corporations attempt to create their very own artificial intelligence, a supercomputer designed to play and run games with the user, both digital and storytelling.It was a machine based on the same technology and software used to create the Pip-Buddy prototyped into a singular, highly advanced gaming machine that ACME had once intended to roll out across their holdings once they had perfected it. In the days of ACME, it had been called GYGAX, but once the bombs dropped and it had begun to learn and evolve it had adopted another name, one it felt more fitting to its purpose: TOLKIEN.
It informed the Neurospecialist that their goals were broadly aligned. Both were aware of the drowned virus: TOLKIEN its history, the Neurospecialist data on its spread and evolution. It was willing to trade, as well as provide data on it’s spread, but first it needed assistance. It had a contact located at a Deep Canyon outpost, one that had been feeding the machine research data on an initiative of the vault. That contact had gone silent: the Neurospecialist would investigate, and retrieve the contact and the data, preferentially the latter.
The facility was known as ACME South Seashell Resort before the war: one of the ACME Towns in the pacific, one that had survived better than others that Deep Canyon had colonized, decontaminating and reactivating it. Before, it had been one of the premier planned communities of Hawaii, used to help mine money from its occupants. Now the semi-sunken village was a laboratory, one located in a razor reef.
Reaching it, the Neurospecialist was alarmed to discover that it was in the midst of a pitched battle, not against any once sophont servant of the drowned, but rather, the surrounding wildlife, which was being slowly twisted and corrupted. The pathogen: it hadn’t fully set in, but it was already beginning to mutate the already harsh reef life into a place humanity could not survive.
The Neurospecialist was not an adept fighter, but they attempted to help as much as they could, destroying attacking pelagiohorrors as they made their approach, eventually leaving their Bathysphere to help rescue a handful of Deep Canyon bioscientists that had been performing field research on the infection that had found themselves trapped by the hostile deep denizens. However, the Neurospecialists assistance wouldn’t be enough: by the time they reached the outpost proper, its final defences were falling. It was at this point that the Neurospecialist would come in contact with TOLKIEN’s agent: a biologist by the name of Elaine McConnel who had been helping steal research on combat robotics to help develop the means to help combat the Drowned. McConnel would reveal that the research was elsewhere in the outpost. However, the facility was rapidly being over-ran, and she needed help reaching safety before the outposts self destruct activated. She told the Neurospecialist that she had been researching the biology of the pathogen and its effect on the wildlife: information that could prove vital for stopping its complete transformation of the biosphere. But she was only useful if she was alive.
Forced to make another decision, the Neurospecialist decided to focus on collecting more biodata, helping McConnel escape by escorting her to a Bathysphere, distracting and fighting away individual Drowned between the two, the pair of them only getting away moments before the facility was annihilated. The data had been lost, but the Neurospecialist had succeeded at least at one goal. Escorting the scientist to Deep Canyon, the Neurospecialist returned to TOLKIEN, who while annoyed at the loss of the research data was willing to still give the Neurospecialist their information thanks to the retrieval of his contact. He told her that the Drowned had their origin in the FEV shipment that had been lost in ACME City, as she had guessed: in the years after the bombs, it had been used to perform unknown experiments into developing anti-radiological technologies, only for a disaster to wind up causing an entire district of the city to be lost: one of the districts were jettisoned during a Ghoul riot, causing the loss of all FEV samples, research data, and whatever organism would serve as the first precursor to the Drowned, all drifting along the currents until it eventually grew heavy enough to fall to the sea-floor.
The supercomputer didn’t know what was lying at that location, but it knew where it could be found, at least. The epicenter of infection, producing thousands of gallons of contaminated water and serving as the beating, pulsating heart of the Drowned.
It needed to be destroyed, or else it would continue growing, continue evolving, continue infecting. One last choice would be given to the Neurospecialist: help destroy the Drowned in their cradle, before they became a threat, or return to their SPD and hope that the Director allowed them to rejoin despite how thoroughly the outside world had contaminated them.
In the end, the Neurospecialist once more chose their conscience, and in so doing damned themselves. They would attempt to destroy this nightmare before it bloomed into a nightmare, an attempt to prevent the pacific from being consumed from a terror from the deep.
They would fail.
TOLKIEN would equip the Neurospecialist with a Bathysphere, one upgraded with advanced technologies that ACME had never successfully rolled out that the AI had collected: sonar weapons that, while crude, had proven effective against Infected organisms, long range radar, black titanium hull. It also contained a small non-nuclear warhead, one that would consume the Epicenter in a vast underwater fireball. The psychic was to guide the warhead to the creatures heart, where it would detonate, killing it and permanently cutting out the core of the drowned.
It would end in their death as well. There was no other means to get the bomb into position, and it would have to be manually detonated. TOLKIEN apologized for this: it had ran all the numbers, attempted to come up with an alternate plan. They simply didn’t have the means for a different strategy, not with what they had available.
With grim acceptance, the Neurospecialist sat out, traversing the dark waves once again. As they drew closer and closer, the psychic would begin to feel a strange pressure in their brain. By the time they saw the abyssal tower, it felt as if drums were being played in their brain.
It was not yet the city it would be, and yet in the spires budding flesh one could see the writhing shape of the pelagic nightmare that was to come. It’s approach was defended by things that almost resembled fishmen: lone swimmers that had ventured too close and been infected by the drowned. Their claws and teeth and pincers were terrifying, but no match for the Bathysphere’s technology, the infected’s bodies coming apart into mush from the sonar weaponry.
Continuing their ascent, the Neurospecialist would take the time to pop each of the buds that were emerging, in the process changing the fate of the wasteland: little did the psychic know each was a gestating leviathan. Each one removed would be another that would never reach maturity. But with each, the Neurospecialist would feel a horrific gash of pain and agony. Each of these psychic pulses were near crippling: only sheer force of will and the fact they merely had to press a few buttons keeping them going.
Soon, they reached the zenith, finding a portal to the center of the creature: a gaping wound that acted almost like a chimney, spewing foul pollution into the ocean. Going town the opening, the Neurospecialist descended into the dark, and in the dark they dreamed.
Some of the visions they suffered were benign: premonitions of the Wrecker Crews and Arbuckle. New Alcatraz and the ghouls they had met there. Their youth in the SPD, time spent learning how to hone and control their abilities.
But as they went lower and lower, dreams became nightmares. The Neurospecialist was confronted by horrific sensory phantasms. Of knives cutting into skin. Of syringes stabbing flesh. The smell of chlorine and chemicals and death. The sensation of flesh sloughing, running, merging and bending.
Desperate, the Neurospecialist attempted to push back against these horrific sensations, only to realize that they were not an attack: these phantasms were mere psychic echoes, dreams of a vast and terrible demiurge created by the terror and pain of its birth, the barest twinges of memories belonging to a vast sleeping deity bleeding over, the sheer weight of its psychic mass pressing in on the humans mind. Too late the Neurospecialist realized they had merely been staring at a dormant god.
And in their terror to escape it’s dreams, they had awoken it.
The first act the Gibbering Mass took upon awaking was to scream its nightmares into reality, the psychic weight of its mind bleeding over, the terror and pain that was every moment of its hideous existence surrounding the Neurospecialist. At first these took the shape of strange, cosmic vistas, filled with all manner of terror from beyond the edge of comprehension: wriggling horrors and strange, surreal abstract devils. But for all their incomprehensibility, these strange and deadly phantasms were a mere prelude to what was to come, the result of the fleeting confusion that lie between sleep and awakefulness: as grotesque as they might have been, these figments of unreality paled to the horrors created from human hands.
Existence boiled and bubbled in that dark place, and the strange cosmic landscapes gave way to new terrifying vistas: a hospital. A reactor. A laboratory. A dozen different locations howled into existence by the Gibbering Mass, each associated with the same pain, the same fear.
Terrified, the Neurospecialist attempted to retreat in their bathysphere, but in the end it too would give way to the chaos, being unmade. The Mass knew they were here: it would not let them leave until they knew the Mass, until the Neurospecialist had heard every soul-breaking inch of it’s pain-song.
And so the Neurospecialist found themselves trapped, forced to flee through the dark in an abyss created by the misery of thousands of lives in a world of needles and knives, one haunted by demented vulturous caricatures clad in lab suits. Desperately, they attempted to maintain their grip on sanity even as they felt the virus enter their body.
But even as they went lower, they could feel their mind being subsumed by this vast and terrible being: its ichory tendrils reaching into the psychics soul even as their mental defences were screamed shattered one by one. The Gibbering Mass Knew them, and so those dark pulsating halls were twisted further, creating a third level of hell, one shaped around the Neurospecialists own pains.
And yet, the Neurospecialists will was stronger than perhaps they had given themselves credit for: even confronted with their own fears given shape, they still attempted to resist, holding out defiance. Soon, they came upon the heart of that forsaken place: a vast void lined with eyes reverberating with the screams of the abyss, and as one final act of resistance, the Neurospecialist screamed back.
This was a mistake. That incomprehensible beast would show the psychic how meaningless their efforts had been: rogue wreckers trafficking in viral contraband, spreading it across the pacific in short sighted greed. Deep Canyon being decimated by Ogata before they could devise a means to defeat the virus. Ventropolis coming undone, shattered by the titans that were to come. And finally, it showed them the ultimate truth.
In the Strategic Personnel Depot they had come from, the Director was already authorizing research into the drowned virus. Not for the purposes of destruction: for the power of evolution. Before their very eyes the Neurospecialist watched as one by one by one every resident of the SPD was fed to the grist-mills to help a man the Neurospecialist had once thought was the highest authority of their life achieve immortality. All at the low, low price of the lives of those the Neurospecialist had sailed the sea to save in the first place.
It was at this point that the Neurospecialist finally ceased their struggles, succumbing to the inevitable. Their will had finally been broken by the realization that all their struggles had been for absolutely nothing. All the pain they had persisted through, all for the power and privilege of petty poisonous people.
It was in that moment the neurospecialist ceased to be, their mind finally coming into unprotected contact with the not-consciousness of the Gibbering Mass, their mind subsumed into its own: the death of ego. The death of self. The death of personality. And in the hollow the Neurospecialist had once occupied, from what little remnants of their shattered cognizance remained, the grief and rage and spite and horror came something new. Something terrible.
Even as the Gibbering Mass lulled itself back to sleep, the Prophet awoke. A chimeric creature, an avatar of consequences. Still possessed of the vestiges of sentience, this strange pelagiomorph would serve as the creatures herald, it’s voice.
In the coming decades, many in the region would report seeing a strange, talking fish-person, one whose flesh rippled like water and eyes glowed like embers. Whether leading bands of drowned to capture and sink wrecker-ships or slyly manipulating individual captains into making fatal mistakes, the Prophet would eventually come into conflict with the Water Seeker, the mutate doing battle with the hero several times over her journey, using the element of surprise and their psychic powers to ambush, disorient, and confuse their foe, their first battle occurring shortly after the Water Seeker accessed the vault.
And yet neither were able to end each other: of the two, the Water Seeker would always come out atop in their battles, and yet each time the Prophet would slink away, escaping to hound their enemy once more, until eventually they found themselves outplayed.
The Water Seeker wasn’t stupid. She realized her foe would continue to hound, harass, and annoy them. So she hatched a plan. During her travels, some time after the destruction of SPD 1-2, she would stop at an island to rest, docking her boat and going to sleep. Seeing their moment to strike, the Prophet creeped upon the island, attempting to assassinate the Water Seeker in their sleep…
Only to find themselves trapped in a force field. A gift from the survivors of SPD 1-2, the Water Seeker had configured it to trap any foe that attempted to attack her while she was vulnerable. And now, the Prophet was caged.
Interrogating it, the Water Seeker found a deranged, if surprising erudite, mind. One who viewed the Drowned Virus as akin to the myth of the ancient flood, wiping away the evil of the world and mutating it into a better one. It was then that the creature revealed something that finally broke the Seekers composure, one that rattled the warrior to her very core.
It told her the origin of the Drowned. How its progenitor had been birthed in an inferno of knives and pain. How it had been engineered by the very city she was trying to save. This was the first time the Water Seeker experienced true doubt and uncertainty.
And yet, she would not falter: having learned all she was willing to learn from the creature, the Water Seeker incinerated the Prophet, putting the creature out of their misery and ending yet another terror of the pacific wastes.[/spoiler]
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Philip Hunt-Bull
At one point you refer to the Neurospecialist as the Water Seeker.
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