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[Out of Milliways: Senior Paladin Tristan gave Ellen a mission- go and find out what happened with the raiders who attacked their water caravan. She stopped at Milliways and got some assistance. The results were bigger than expected.]

Ellen's still in her Chinese stealth suit when she opens the door from the Capital Wasteland and lets her companions back in. There was neither time nor reason to change out of it, after all. "Okay, we're clear," she says. "Does anyone mind if I get something to drink first? I'll fill you in on the details in a minute..."

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"The what, now?" says Ellen. "Anyway, supermutants are immune to pretty much any disease you can name and very resistant to radiation. And they don't die of old age. If it weren't for the homicidal mania and the fact that their brains seem to degenerate with the savagery and the fact that they're all completely sterile, they'd probably be a really successful separate species... but the thing is that they keep growing, too. Even if they'd reached full adult height before being infected with FEV, as long as there's food, they grow- most of them, anyway. Fawkes, my friend who's one of the civilized ones, is two hundred years old and he's only about eight and a half feet tall- but the thing the raiders in Evergreen Mills have penned up is a good eighteen feet high at the very least."

"So that means he could be over a thousand years old? Assuming a foot of growth per century? Do they get stronger the older they are or is it tied to their mass?"

Ellen shakes her head. "At the most, it's two hundred years old," she says. "Forced Evolutionary Virus didn't exist before then. Behemoths are a lot stronger than normal mutants- Fawkes is as old as any of the Behemoths are likely to be, but he's still pretty normal, other than the being civilized and decent thing. There might be some kind of chemical or environmental factor involved in becoming one of those things, I don't know. Fawkes routinely runs around with several hundred pounds of load on his back and doesn't have any problems with it, but a Behemoth can pick up and throw cars and attack people with lengths of pre-War sewer pipe without batting an eye."

"Okay, so they're feeding it well. What else, you mentioned mini-nukes aren't effective?"

"They're tough," Ellen says. "The mutagenic process tends to make what used to be ordinary human skin into a really tough, really thick hide, and it's only thicker in the Behemoths. They'll eventually go down if you deal out enough damage to them, but most of the time they don't even notice pain until you've seriously threatened some body part's structural integrity. The mini-nukes hurt them with the explosion, but the radiation doesn't affect them at all. It's possible to kill one by snapping its spine, but you have to be something on the order of a super-powered Amazon warrior to do it, and even she had trouble with the one we fought in the Capitol Building."

"What's the blast radius of these mini-nukes? We don't have anything like them in my world."

Ellen rubs at her neck a moment, thinking; then she cites a number. ~~Fallout 3 distances have never been the player's forte.~~ "It's... really not a good idea to use one if you're not in power armor. And you should probably take Rad-X to block radiation absorption before you go into a battle where one is likely."

Andrea holds up her hands.

"Oh no, I like boom as much as the next girl but I hold the line at nuclear. I was just trying to gauge how tough these bastards are. They bullet proof?"

"More just... bullet-resistant," Ellen says. "As if they had natural body armor. I've fought a couple of them in the past and tend to hang back and use my Gauss rifle on their legs- it takes a lot of shots, but it's still easier than trying to hit the heart, and at least it puts them on the ground instead of running around."

"Do you know if their brains function like ours? Is their bone mass tougher?" Andrea asks thinking of kill shots. The medulla oblongata can be a great target if you can get to it. "What about breathing, that something they still need to do?"

"They still need to breathe," Ellen says, "but their bones are a lot thicker, and their neck musculature is kind of huge and spread out compared to a human's, so it's a lot harder to get through to the brain stem, I know that much..."

"Damn. I bet they can hold their breath a long time too." There goes the napalm-in-the-face idea.

"Possibly," Ellen agrees. "I honestly don't know. They're extremely rare, and when the Brotherhood hears about them we usually take the heavy artillery and attack from a distance to wear them down, if we can."

"Think this is something they're going to deal with?"

"I... actually, I was going to contact some people I know here," Ellen admits. "And ask for volunteers. I could go back to the Citadel and get a bunch of soldiers, but aside from the Behemoth there's a lot of raiders holed up in that valley, and a bunch of slaves and other prisoners. Some of the people here have powers and abilities way beyond anything the Brotherhood can do, and they've helped me before, or I've helped them, or both. It might be easier to hit the area with a Milliways force first- they won't be able to prepare for it or know what they're dealing with."

"Well as I said, I'd be glad to help if I was available though against what we're talking about, I don't know that I could be much help. I could be good for taking care of the Raiders while someone else took care fo the Behemoth though."

Maybe she should stay here instead of going back. What did she have back home that was worth returning to anyway? Nah, running or hiding just does sit well with her.

Ellen nods. "I was hoping to get some help from a superhero or two for the Behemoth," she says. "Assuming I haven't used up my favors with them- I don't like being in somebody's debt, even metaphorically. But we'll probably need people on the ground to deal with the raiders, and there were slaves we're going to need to get out of there. And if you know anyone who's good at removing explosives let me know, because I can only disarm proximity mines so quickly, you know?"

"I can imagine," Andrea says thinking. "If we have the time I might be able to help with that. We had some training with explosives in the Academy but no one really uses them in the field as the magic waves make them too undependable for use. I'm a quick study though, so if we had a deactivated model to work with or some one who could train me. WHat about that Voodoo guy?"

"Voodoo's a Navy SEAL," Ellen says. "Different specialization- he doesn't work with unexploded ordnance. I had to learn how to deactivate mines almost as soon as I got out of the Vault. I can show you once I get hold of one and disarm it, though."

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