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Ellen has commandeered a good-sized table and covered it in maps. Just two, but they happen to be fairly large ones. The one on the left is from Bar; it's a highly rated map of some kind (she's not sure what 'AAA' means, but it sounds like a grade) that shows the Washington, DC area sometime around 2050 or so.

The one on the right is pieced together from printouts both of her own Pip-Boy's data and of information gathered by a mercenary group of her acquaintance. Reilly's Rangers have been very busy people ever since the Enclave as thrown down.

It's interesting comparing the two, at least to her. The dog under her table might beg to differ, if he weren't chewing on a knotted length of rawhide.

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Alex pauses as she walks by, mug of tea in hand. It's the map that catches her eye. She was only in DC for six months, but it was so foreign to her, the shape of the Beltway is seared into her mind.

"Is that Washington, DC?"

"Hm? Oh, yes," Ellen says, looking up. "Several hundred years before my time, in the case of the one intact map there. Are you familiar with the area?"

Alex leans in, bending to read the writing. She is in complete denial about the fact that she might need reading glasses at some point.

"Yes. I was only there for six months, and this map is about fifty years after my time, but this -- this is the Mall. And the Lincoln memorial. The cherry trees were right along here."

Ellen nods. "I've seen them- they're long gone in my world, but I visited a friend's world years ago and saw them," she says. "The Lincoln Memorial's still there- see, here, this is the most recent map we have, it's mostly drawn up by a mercenary company. They call it the Temple of the Union now."

She looks back and forth between the two.

"Good lord..."

It is not the same place she remembers.

"I was born here," Ellen says, indicating a dot marked Project Purity on the new map and Jefferson Memorial on the old. "In the basement- part of the Memorial's anniversary renovations before the Great War involved building a lot of bombproofing into the structure and establishing some emergency shelters and such underneath it."

"What are these?"

She point out the locations marked 101, 108, 106, 87, 112, and 92. They're scattered all over the map, and they're not in any prominent locations that she remembers.

"Those are Vaults," Ellen says. "Shelters officially built to hold up to a thousand people each for a span of time that could potentially extend for years on end."

She taps 101.

"This is where I grew up. My father brought me there when I was only a few days old, and they locked the door behind us. Didn't find out I'd been born on the surface until I was nineteen. It's probably the Vault that lasted the longest of all of them, at least in this part of the country."

Alex looks back up at Ellen, peering at her for a moment.

"We've met before. I think. Awhile back. Alex. Alex Drake."

She holds her mug of tea in one hand and extends the other in greeting.

"I was probably a bit out of it then. Didn't realize I was dead at the time. That's all sorted now, though."

"I've heard that happens sometimes- not realizing, I mean," Ellen says, and shakes the offered hand. Her own is calloused six ways from Sunday, as power armor and her usual choice of energy weapons tend to leave fairly distinctive marks of use. "Ellen Park. From the Capital Wasteland, where it's spring of the year 2279 just now. Good to meet you again."

"The pleasure is mine." She gives Ellen an apologetic smile.

"So, I'm curious. Why the nostalgia for DC of old?"

"Well-" Ellen indicates the winged insignia stitched in silver on her outfit. "The organization I serve in, the Brotherhood of Steel, is dedicated to protecting the people of the Wasteland and reclaiming the technology and knowledge of the past before the War. Which has been really hard given overall conditions, I'm sure you can imagine, but recently a scouting expedition into this area here had a few of its members actually survive and make it back to the Citadel- you'd call it the Pentagon. We're not entirely sure, since Knight Capo wasn't really very lucid, but... there's a really good chance they may have found a buried-but-surviving portion of the Library of Congress."

"Oh, really. I have wonder what, in all that time, remains that could be of use. I'd imagine you're not looking for the complete works of Jane Austen."

"Anything. We'll take anything," Ellen says immediately. "Not a lot actually survived the War intact enough to be useful. We have a standing bounty on books from before the War, and we're reprinting individual volumes of whatever we can sort out from a holotape archive of the public library that used to exist in Arlington. Whether it's scientific or historic or just cultural, even if it's just a children's' story, it's still important to us."

(Maybe not to the guys in Mojave Chapter, assuming they're still alive, but that's their problem.)

Alex nods, her eyebrows rising high.

"Printing presses? Ink? How does that all work?"

"Most of the presses were salvaged from the ruins of a couple of old printing-houses in the DC area- the Capitol Post newspaper offices, Hubris Comics, a few places that might've been academic printers. Things like that," Ellen says. "We have some chemists among the Scribes in the Order of the Quill who're pretty good at mixing up their own reagents as necessary. And there's a woman in the town where I live who's devised a process for taking moldy, spoiled prewar books that can't be read any more and bleaching the filth out until they can be printed on again, although Moira's process kinda stinks to high heaven."

"That's brilliant. People never cease to amaze me at how resourceful they can be in a time of need."

She goes back to looking at the map.

"This is Langley, out here. Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters. Not precisely that kind of intelligence, but it might be worth a look?"

Ellen considers the map for a moment, then traces the river hesitantly on the pieced-together mapwork done by the Rangers. Eventually her hand comes to a stop. "I've been there," she says. "If there was ever an intelligence agency there it was long gone by the time of the Great War. There were some houses standing- they'd been patched up by people forced out of Little Lamplight. They called it Big Town. The place'd been raided by mutants from Germantown so many times that if there were ever anything worthwhile it was long since gone."

"Hmm. What about the Smithsonian?"

Alex spent a lot of time going through all the different branches of the Smithsonian.

"The- oh," says Ellen, as she sees where Alex is pointing. "The Museum of History. I've actually been in and out of there a couple of times. The Halls of Modern History were inaccessible, but there were some good parts. There was an exhibition on Abraham Lincoln going on at the time the bombs fells. A bunch of the artifacts that were in there are in the Temple of the Union now. Been to the National Archives, too, although the robots on security duty there were still active and pretty homicidal. We were lucky to be able to talk the one in charge into letting us leave unharmed."

"Homicidal robots!? Good grief."

She sits back on her heels a bit.

"That would certainly make this quest for data a whole lot more challenging."

"Well, they're not everywhere," Ellen allows. "The Museum of Technology was mostly occupied by supermutants, with a few areas still protected by prewar security systems. The greenskins were just as deadly as any robot, you understand, they were just alive and prone to eating people instead of just incinerating them. And sometimes you just run into a place where the people who've holed up are basically savage every-man-for-himself types who like to decorate the walls with spikes and blood- they did that in Arlington Library, that was kind of a mess."

Ellen, it has been noted, has something of a gift for understatement.

"And anywhere that's particularly dark and dank is likely to attract feral ghouls, which is what happens when someone takes so much radiation over the course of their lives that they should've died but never did. Regular ghouls are all right, they're people who're just very nasty to look at, but feral ghouls lose their minds in the process and attack anything that moves."

Alex blinks rapidly as she listens, both hands wrapped around her mug of tea.

"Bloody hell. You must think the bar is a walk in the park, compared to your world."

Ellen smiles, just a little. "I spent the first nineteen years of my life underground," she says. "It took me months to get to a point where I could walk out into the big room with the blue ceiling and not hyperventilate myself half unconscious, for whatever that's worth."

That gets another sympathetic smile.

"Oh, that's -- also horrible. I -- just -- wow. I don't even know what to say to that, except, can I buy the next round?"

"Sam Adams?" Ellen says hopefully. "Or Guinness. Guinness is fine too."

"Right this way, and you can have both. On me."

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