milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Today had been going really well for Ellen.

She'd been called back to the Citadel to report on the RobCo factory status, and she had good results to report. She'd been able to give a coherent account of all the measures taken at Second Diana to ensure that their communications tech was working properly, and it had been accepted. She'd been sent to the Order of the Shield armor labs to give them the Enclave power armor she'd earned from Scribe Bigsley, so that they could retrofit it to her, upgrade it, and repaint it to Brotherhood standards. And she'd even been able to handle Squire Maxson when the boy came to her and asked her, as chaplain, if his parents were really dead and what that meant for him and the rest of his life. Not perfectly, obviously, but well enough that he promised to come back and talk some more the next time she was at the Citadel, and keep on coming back regularly when he needed it. So that had been really, really good.

And then she'd just HAD to go and talk to Senior Scribe Jameson, hadn't she.

She's not sure her face is ever going to stop burning. Talking to the head of the Order of the Quill about- well, it'd been the most embarrassing five minutes of her life that she could recall. So she's gone to the Bar and she's going to stay RIGHT THERE until she no longer wants to pull her power helmet on and do her very best Knight-Captain Gallows impression* for a week.

Feel free to bother her in the meantime, though. It's not like you're from the Wasteland, right?

*Which consists mostly of "...", as Knight-Captain Gallows is widely known as the least talkative man in the Citadel

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Remind me," Ellen mutters, "never to ever ask Scribe Jameson anything again. She's just going to laugh at me."

"Whatever you asked, it can't have been that bad," Annabelle says with a grin as she slides into a chair nearby.

"I asked her about the Brotherhood's fraternization rules," Ellen mutters. "Because I didn't know them. It was a perfectly good reason!"

"Perfectly sensible," Annabelle agrees.

Then there's a pause.

"Er, what's fraternization when it's at home?"

"Socialization and personal association with somebody in your chain of command, basically," Ellen says. "It's more complicated than that but it amounts to rules about who you're allowed to be social with in your off hours."

"Seriously? They have RULES about that sort of thing?" Annabelle shakes her head in disbelief. "Sounds like a damn stupid idea to me, limiting who you can be friends with."

"What did their policy end up being, anyway?" Since Ellen presumably found out.

"It makes more sense than you'd think. If an officer was close friends with some of the soldiers under his or her command, they'd be inclined to keep them out of combat for their own good, even if it put others in danger," Ellen says. "Or if they were dating somebody they could order around and they got into an argument, they could force them into the line of fire, like David ordered with Uriah when he was having an affair with Bathsheba and wanted Uriah dead and out of the way. So if there's rules that say you're not allowed to get close with the people who take your orders or give you your orders, that kind of thing is less likely to happen."

She sighs, and looks away. "Scribe Jameson says that it's not fraternization if it's across the Order line. Knights and Paladins are the combat arm of the Brotherhood, so that's our Order, and the Scribes are noncombatants, so that's their Order- so it's not a problem even if you're all assigned to the same project and you technically outrank them, so long as one of you is in the fighting orders and the other one isn't."

Annabelle has no idea who these David, Uriah and Bathsheba people are, but that's probably not relevant. (She vaguely recalls there being all sorts of weird names back during the 1700s, maybe they lived then?)

The part when Ellen looks away distracts her from that line of thought, however.

"Someone in the Scribes catch your eye?" Annabelle asks with a grin.

"Nothing happened yet! I wanted to check first!"

Annabelle chuckles a bit at Ellen's indignation. "I didn't accuse you of anything, improper or otherwise," she points out with a smile.

"Not going to leave me in the dark about who they are, are you?" Don't make her break out the sad puppy eyes, Ellen.

"Oh, you wouldn't know him- you've never met him," Ellen says. "He just- seemed like somebody I ought to get to know, that's all... and he was one of the Scribes on the factory project, which is my command, which is why I was worried. So I wanted to check, first. Stop smiling like that. Scribe Jameson looked just like that the whole time."

Annabelle coughs. "I can't help it!" she protests. "You asking that questions is just so....you."

"I didn't want to get anybody in trouble," Ellen mutters. "I didn't want to get him in trouble. It might look bad. You know?"

Annabelle pulls Ellen into a sideways hug. "I know you wouldn't," she replies. "It's just that most folks wouldn't have the presence of mind to think about that until it was a bit too late, you know?"

Ellen sighs and leans against Annabelle. "My father set all the wrong examples," she mutters. "Going ahead and doing stuff without planning what was going to happen next was his thing. I don't want to wind up like that."

"Sometimes you learn the most from seeing other people screw up," Annabelle agrees.

"If you ever want advice about...things....well I've messed up quite a lot."

"... well, maybe," Ellen says after some thought. "I mean- I'd thought- originally, I'd thought that when I got hold of the alien ship and the people on it via the radio, I'd thought maybe I'd see about Dr. Tercorien up there? He was an Army medic in 2077, and then the aliens kidnapped him, and when I thawed him out we fought together for a while... he seemed pretty nice then, but when I got hold of him again he turned out to have more problems than I wanted to deal with. And I know that's kind of mean of me, but he's two hundred years older than I am even if he spent most of them frozen and I'd.... Jerald's just a much better idea than someone who lost his whole entire world, you know?"

"'Never get involved with anyone with more issues than you', Dixon taught me that one. Shame he only learned that AFTER his marriage went down in flames and his ex-wife became a supervillain."

Ellen winces. "Oh, dear..."

"Yeeeeah. The only way you could say that divorce was 'amicable' was if you defined 'amicable' as 'wishing virulent death on one another'."

"As 'the Mechanatrix' she went on to sell all sorts of nasty gizmos to the highest bidder. As you might imagine, we generally ended up having to deal with the damn things."

"Ugh. At least Tanya never tried to contract her ants out to anybody before she gave up the villain life," Ellen says. "That must've driven you up the wall."

"It did. Especially since we never managed to make her pay for any of the crap she pulled. She always had something we needed to deal with another problem, a hostage...."

Annabelle's expression turns dark. "We figured she was one of the folks bankrolling experimentation on unwilling human subjects too, but we could never PROVE it."

"Lovely," Ellen murmurs. "What happened to her in the end?"

"I'm not sure," Annabelle explains. "She was still alive and active when I died."

After that, a lot of nasty things happened. "She might have died during the Second World War, might have just gone underground, taken a new identity."

"It's entirely possible that she's still alive back home. She was using her inventions to extend her lifespan before I died, and Inspired like us seem to live a hell of a lot longer than the average human without any tech helping things along."

"Well, if she is alive, I hope she's at least tried to reform," Ellen says. "For whatever that's worth."

Even if she figures it's really unlikely, it's okay to hope.

(no subject)

aeons_crackshot - 2012-11-14 04:40 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only