milliways_bar | The Pilgrim's Return

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The Pilgrim's Return

The quarian who comes through the door is walking a little taller than she did the last time she was here, and more confidently as well. In fact, she's very nearly swaggering. She's also in a much better mood than she was on her previous visit - although she's not as happy as she might otherwise have been.

Still, she's in enough of a celebratory mood that the unexpected appearance of Milliways doesn't ruffle her one bit. She is also feeling generous enough that she might buy drinks for friendly strangers, in the interests of spreading her good mood around.

[Tiny space tag: Tali'Zorah]

[OOC: Slowtimes are inevitable, but I promise I will respond to all tags when I can. Also, until next Saturday, I'm on mountain time, not the usual Eastern Standard Time.]

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"I remember you told me about that." Tali sounds unsettled, for obvious reasons. "I still have a difficult time believing it - not that I don't think you were telling the truth," she adds. "This was about the survival of a species. It seems like someone wasn't taking that seriously enough."

"Maybe there were other Vaults that took things more seriously," Ellen says. "Vault-Tec can't have been everybody. I mean, the Brotherhood of Steel had to come from somewhere- they've got all kinds of old Army gear and technology, I don't think they'd've been part of the experiment. And the Enclave claims they're the legitimate government, or their descendants or something, so maybe they had other plans and better ways of keeping people alive and un-mutated."

... wow, does anyone else smell irony in here?

"You mentioned the Brotherhood of Steel before," Tali observes. "What are they, exactly?"

"They're soldiers," Ellen says. "They're supposed to be in the Wasteland gathering up whatever pre-war technology or books or other knowledge they can find and sending it back west to their headquarters, but their leader's declared that it's more important to protect people from the supermutants as best they can. I'm not sure how many of them there are, but they're settled in what used to be the country's military headquarters. It was called the Pentagon then, but they call it the Citadel now."

Tali wonders for a moment what name the Protheans had for the Citadel, back when it belonged to them. But she leaves off that line of thought before long: it's just idle speculation, and not really relevant to the conversation at hand. "They should be focused on that anyway, shouldn't they? Protecting people. They can collect all the technology they want, but without people, they can't really do anything with it."

Ellen makes a face. "There's a group of people who used to be theirs," she says. "They call themselves Brotherhood Outcasts. They're trying to concentrate on the tech instead of following their leaders' orders. Their attitude is, and I quote, 'Anyone can make another person. Knowing how to make a P-94 plasma rifle? That's all but lost.'"

Tali is silent for a moment. "I would contend that it's probably not easy to make a person, or raise them to adulthood, on a world that's still recovering from a global nuclear conflict," she says. "And if they really want to recover their technology, they should help make the world safe enough for people to start studying and investing in science again."

"You'd think that," Ellen says. "But honestly? Other than a small group I worked with once, all the Outcasts I've ever met have been complete jerks. I'd rather deal with the regular Brotherhood even if the Outcasts have better tech."

"I don't blame you," Tali agrees. "The Outcasts do not sound like they have a healthy attitude."

"Definitely not," Ellen says. "I just hope they don't wind up a problem... anyway, I got the regular Brotherhood a library's worth of archived books and data, so they seem to like me enough that I'm not worried about the others. Hopefully someday I'll be able to convince them to help guard my father's water purifier, once we can get him set up again."

Tali cocks her head. "Guard a water purifier?" Please excuse her for being confused: while she is familiar with water purifiers, the ones she knows of aren't nearly big enough to clean out the whole D.C. tidal basin.

"My father is trying to build a purifier big enough to provide safe drinking water for the entire Capital Wasteland," Ellen says. "It's been a dream of his since before I was born, but he had to give it up after my mother died so that he could raise me in safety. Now that we're both living on the surface instead of in Vault 101, he's back at work on the project, and I'm going to do what I can to make sure the premises are properly guarded."

"Oh. If it's big enough for that, no wonder it needs guarding." Clean water is a precious resource, and also heavily contested in certain places. "What will you do after everything is taken care of with the purifier?"

"I don't know," Ellen admits. "I may wind up still working with the water. Dad can build a machine as big as he wants, but there's no pipes to carry it anywhere and no way for people to get it into their homes. I don't know if he's even thought that part through yet, so I might have to do it for him if it's going to get done at all."

"I don't know if you can build pipes long-distance, though," Tali says. "Even leaving aside the pressure problem, and the issues of fixing leaks, you'd have to worry about people tapping into the pipe when they shouldn't, or breaking it up and stealing the metal."

Ellen nods. "There used to be underground pipes," she says, "but nobody has the means of digging that deep or casting a pipe that large any more. Let alone the pressure and the leaks. The water's going to have to be transported over land, in containers...." She winces. "And we don't have vehicles, so I'm probably going to have to keep all those Brahmin I picked up just to have animals capable of carrying all that water. Huh boy."

"A Brahmin is a pack animal, I suppose?" Tali says. "Well, you do what you can with what you have. If there's a settlement near the purifier, that at least will benefit greatly. And maybe expand. Things like that are the basis for civilization and technological advancement, not scrounging around for old plasma rifles."

Among the quarians, thinking about how to rebuild one's civilization is something of a popular pastime, though mostly speculative for now.

Ellen nods. "The nearest settlement is Rivet City," she says. "People colonized an old aircraft carrier to live in. The Citadel itself isn't too far away, either, but that's not a settlement proper- well, there's still people in the DC ruins, anyway, it'll be a big help for them in between mutant attacks and things like that. We'll see. One way or another we'll work out something."

"Maybe you could make smaller versions of the purifier, combined with something that pulls up groundwater," Tali suggests. "That would be a great help to smaller settlements. Or perhaps people will start moving to the tidal basin, now that the water is clean."

"That would be fantastic," Ellen says. "Either one of them. I'll propose the smaller ones to Dad when I see him next, if he gets the big one working. He's much, much more of a scientist than I was ever trained to be."

"I wish you success in your endeavor. Keelah sel'ai."

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The Pilgrim's Return

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