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[Out of Milliways: Death From Above. Spoilers for Fallout 3: Broken Steel.]

The door swings open on a dimly lit indoor scene, the room beyond all bunk beds and small tables. Ellen trudges through in her dark green Brotherhood fatigues; after the day she's had you couldn't pay her to keep her armor on one minute longer. It takes her a minute to realize that she's not in the hallway any more.

She makes her way over to one of the booths and sits down carefully, then gives up on the whole 'careful' thing and slumps in her seat instead. The inquiring wait-rat gets mumbled at.

There's probably going to be fried Cram and coffee at her table soon, so if you aren't put off by greasy foods, come by and say hi.

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Lorna is at the adjoining table, playing with bits and pieces of metal. They represent the materials that will build the addition to their space shuttle that will serve as their house. As she builds, she tries to memorize where each piece goes, to ensure that she'll put it together right tomorrow.

However, she is not too busy to look up and notice her neighbor. She smiles at Ellen, noting the fatigue the woman is practically radiating. "Rough day?"

It takes Ellen a moment to realize that was addressed to her; she glances up and blinks a bit. Green, she's used to, but normally that's... you know, skin. Not hair. In fact most of the green people back home don't even have hair, so-

She's staring, isn't she. With a rueful sigh she straightens herself up. "Sorry," she says. "That obvious?"

(Her icon is, shall we say, not entirely correct. Her hair is currently very short; her head was completely shaven not all that long ago, and she's had about a month or two of regrowth. What's grown back in is a sort of steel-grey. And there are scars here and there, along the hairline and on her face; they just, again, are not accurately reflected by the icon.)

The stare doesn't bother Lorna overly much. She's used to much worse. It's kind of funny to her, that green hair can still be strange to a patron at a bar like this.

"You look like a textbook case of crappy day syndrome." Her tone is not cheerful, but it's upbeat. She doesn't want to annoy the other woman. There's nothing worse than having a rough day and being told to cheer up by some upbeat stranger. "At least things are quiet here."

"I'm just glad I don't have to run any more," Ellen says. "I had to deliver a message holotape to the other side of the Wasteland back home, and I had to go the whole way on foot. Not fun, when you're wearing armor. Ten or fifteen miles like that-"

She wrinkles her nose and murmurs something else to the wait-rat, who runs off to get her drink.

"Quiet is good, definitely."

Lorna winces in sympathy. "That definitely qualifies. Are you in the army, or something like that?"

She'll probably ask about the wasteland later, but that's less interesting to her. It's pretty self-explanatory, really. She just hopes this woman isn't from some crazy alternate future of her own world.

Given the variety of people she's seen in the Bar, that seems unlikely.

"Something like that," Ellen agrees, and taps the stylized patch on one shoulder. "The Brotherhood of Steel is descended from the remains of the U.S. Army left over from two hundred years ago. So I should probably ask, just to be safe, if you can tell me who the first American on the moon was, because I don't like telling people things that'll happen in their futures."

"Neil Armstrong, unless someone else made it and they didn't tell us." There might have been craziness on the moon after that first voyage, but Magneto hadn't taken Neil's glory away. "From the way you looked at my hair, I don't think we have too much to worry about, on that front."

She puts her fake house aside, waving down a waitrat for some tea. "Beside, you wouldn't be the first time traveler to tell me about how bad thigns get on Earth in a few years."

"Just checking," Ellen says. "In my world, the first American on the moon was Richard Wade. We kind of had a planet-wide nuclear war about two hundred years ago. There might've been people with your color hair before that but there sure as heck aren't any now, not that I've seen."

"My name's Ellen, by the way."

"Lorna." She extends a hand to Ellen. "Sounds terrible. What was it about? Or do you even know, now?"

She tries to think of a war that happened two hundred years ago, where she really remembers the cause. By now it's probably come down to 'world leaders are idiots', which is a sentiment Lorna won't have much trouble understanding.

Ellen shakes the offered hand. "Oh, it was pretty much the outgrowth of about twenty years' worth of conventional war over natural resources," she says. "The oil started running out first, and then the coal, and an awful lot of other stuff followed, and when things like invading Alaska and annexing Canada didn't really bring an end to the problem, well..."

She makes a 'boom!' gesture with both hands and shrugs.

"... you get the picture. Mr. Brotch would yell at me for being that sketchy about it, but he's not here right now."

That's a new one on her. People just running out of stuff, and starting wars over it. Of course, that made perfect sense, and she had no trouble believing it. Usually people from the future had more dazzling stories about how things had gone bad, usually involving one evil maniac.

"That's pretty depressing. Are things better now, or is still pretty crappy?"

"It was bad," Ellen says soberly. "Nobody's really recovered. I mean, I hear there's some decent places out west, but... I live in what used to be the Washington, DC area and they call it the Capital Wasteland now. That should probably give you an idea. Most of the groundwater's still radioactive, and there's hardly any plants that've really gotten adapted to growing in the Wasteland conditions, just scrubby little things the cattle are lucky to get any grazing off of at all."

"That sounds terrible." Her voice is sympathetic. She's been some pretty wretched places. Of course, she's never had to stay there forever, because everywhere else sucks about as much.

"That's about the size of it," Ellen says. "Although we're working on making things better, obviously... I mean, some of us, anyway. There's always going to be jerks around who just can't do the right thing."

"There are always people like that." She wrinkles her nose up in disdain. "It makes everything harder. Is that the kind of thing your military deals with?"

"Well. More like the supermutants- which I should probably mention aren't like the mutants who come here to the Bar, they're former humans who've been infected with a prewar virus that turns them huge and green and homicidal and cannibalistic," Ellen says. "They're a bigger threat to most of the Wasteland than just the raiders and slave-takers and things like that."

Lorna winces at the mention of mutants, but doesn't say anything once it is explained to her. It was, after all, a different universe. "There's nothing human about them anymore?" That must be one crazy virus.

"I've met two of them who're capable of rational thought and carrying on a conversation," says Ellen. "And I've met several hundred of them who've tried to kill me, or killed people in front of me, or who were eating their prisoners. Or some combination of the three. They just... lose it, as they get older. They get bigger and more monstrous and less and less like anything civilized at all, and eventually they end up completely inhuman, except for walking on two legs and using weapons and having opposable thumbs."

Ellen doesn't generally remember her dreams. Any number of fights with supermutants have made her grateful for this. The one at the rad-field outside Vault 87, especially so.

"Is it highly contagious?" She's not worried about catching anything in the Bar. Or at all, really. She's just curious about this strange world.

"Not that I know of. You have to be exposed to the original stock for it to infect you," Ellen says. "I've gotten enough supermutant blood on me that I would've been infected by now if that were a problem."

"At least there's that." She wonders how it would change things if there were a good chance everyone who came in contact with the mutants would catch it.

"It must be nice to have a place like this to come to, where violence is not allowed at all."

"It helps," Ellen says. "It's a relief, definitely... although I always feel a bit bad telling other people about it, because they're usually from somewhere nicer and I'm not trying to complain about it, it just comes out sounding that way."

"Well, I don't think anyone would blame you if you were complaining. That sounds like a hard life, and I'd probably be complaining a lot if I had to live it."

Or crazy. That's the other option.

"I try not to think about it too much," Ellen admits. "Complaining doesn't really change much of anything, and thinking about it too hard makes me want to scream, and I'd rather be doing something about it than screaming, honestly."

"That makes sense. Have you found many interesting things to do here?"

Lorna is all about using her time in the Bar to unwind. She might not be surrounded by conflict, but only the terminally stupid would be off guard in her universe.

"Oh, yes!" Ellen beams. "They've got all kinds of books here- whole books, too, not books where you have to work out what one of the pages says because it's burnt or spotted with mold or something. And I've been to another patron's world once, that was neat- I got to see what DC looked like before the bombs. And I've met soldiers here who've been helping me catch up with my training, which is good because it's meant I haven't gotten eaten or shot too much."

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