milliways_bar | (no subject)

"Would you like a beer recommendation?" Sasha, two stools down, offers. "You look like you've had that kind of day."

"I wouldn't mind," Ellen says. "All the beer at home is horrible, so I've been learning about the good stuff here. Hi, Sasha. It's good to see you again."

"Do you have any definite preferences at this point? For a rough day like it looks like you've had, I generally prefer a bock or a doppel; those are darker and less bitter than the pilsners that seem to be the default in America."

"The only dark beer I actually know is Guinness," Ellen says. "Gene Hunt introduced me to that one. Honestly, all the beers at home are just awful- most of them are older than I am by an amount I don't like to think about, so I'm fine with testing out whatever they've got here as long as it doesn't wind up being sweet, for whatever reason."

"Maybe not a bock, then. Those can be fairly sweet. Let's try a different variety altogether - Bar? Two bottles of Stone IPA from 2004 on my tab, please."

Bar obliges.

"It's good to see you again too. What's going on back at home?"

"I've been working in-"

She stops, thinking.

"I probably haven't told you about the aliens, now that I think about it...I don't know if your world has intelligent life on other planets, but in my world there've been a race of spindly little green-skinned creatures from some other world who've been kidnapping human beings for study. I mean, they used to. The ones who did it are dead now, but they left behind an awful lot of people in cryogenic storage on board their ship- which is still in orbit."

That's probably a good spot to pause for the initial questions and impressions, right?

"...No. No, you didn't mention that before. That's not a problem we've had, thankfully."

Small pause.

"Are you trying to thaw them back out, now?"

Ellen nods. "It's slow going, because if we rush it too much we risk losing them," she says. "The aliens've been kidnapping people since the time of the samurai in Japan, so a lot of these people've been frozen for centuries. Between the medical issues- which at least aren't part of my job- and trying to help these poor people deal with the fact that they've been out of commission for longer than they can imagine, and everything that's happened in the world since then... well, it's kind of a mess."

"I can hardly imagine," Sasha says. "Centuries' worth of culture shock. I can also hardly imagine what the aliens thought they were accomplishing."

"I don't know, and I'm not sure I ever want to," Ellen says. "I'm afraid I'm the reason they stopped- this was- this was before I met the Brotherhood..." She shakes her head. "I don't like thinking about it much, but they grabbed me when I was investigating one of their scout ships that'd crashed in the Wasteland. I got together with a woman who hadn't been frozen yet, and we managed to thaw three people out safely and work from there."

If she doesn't go into too much detail about it, she doesn't have to remember what happened the first time she woke up, which is not a memory anyone should be subjected to. Particularly not a psyker- even if this one is better at controlling what he hears than Professor Xavier.

"Anyway, the reason I've been having such a rough time today is because I'm one of the Brotherhood of Steel's chaplains. I'm posted to a small garrison attached to the community we've been sending the freshly thawed people into. When I'm not on a field mission that needs an energy weapons specialist, I get the majority of the counseling work with these poor people."

She picks up her drink and waves it meaningfully in Sasha's direction.

Sasha just nods at the first part. He's got memories he doesn't like thinking about, too. (Does anyone not?)

On the other hand ...

"Would you say these people are more traumatized by the culture shock, or by what the aliens did to them?"

"Most of them don't like talking about what the aliens did to them at all," says Ellen. "Except for that senator from New Hampshire. He won't shut up about it. The man tried to show me his surgical scars once."

Now there's a memory that nobody wants to retain.

"I think, though, that the others... as bad as what the aliens did, the fact that everyone they ever loved is dead, that the world's basically been broken, and that there's absolutely no way of getting back to the way things used to be during their lifetimes is kinda hitting them hardest."

Sasha's frown is more of a sad frown than a grumpy frown.

"Yes. Unfortunately, that's not the sort of trauma there's a simple cure for, even with all my abilities."

He thinks a little.

"I wonder if there's anything from before the War that they're missing in particular. Something that would make them feel like not everything has been lost, even if most things have."

"It's possible," Ellen says. "I've tried to make a point of bringing them pre-War food and drink when I can- Nuka-Cola lasts a weirdly long time, for some reason. And I don't care much for Fancy Lads snack cakes but apparently the ones that survived in some of the desks in the Capitol Building are exactly the same as the originals. A lot of people seem to perk up at that."

Sasha chuckles. "We have a joke in my time, that the only things sure to survive a nuclear war are the cockroaches and the junk food."

"They did," says Ellen. "They're this big now."

She puts her drink aside and holds up both hands about as far apart as a large rabbit or small human baby.

"Greasy, too. But edible, especially if you have something decent to cook them in. I try not to mention that kind of thing around the new people. I just give them the snack cakes and go cook somewhere else."

"They don't get nearly that large where I'm from, but I think in some cultures people do eat them. I can see where that would take some getting used to, though.

"Are the mutated critters generally enlarged?"

"Mostly. I don't know what the mirelurk kings are descended from," Ellen says. "But the radroaches are that big, and the molerats are as big as my dog, and the Brahmin- well, they're cattle, but they've got two heads and eight stomachs and the males take twice as long to make into steers, let's just put it like that. I'm not sure how big their ancestors were. The yao guai, those are bears, they're about as tall as my shoulder at the top of their shoulder humps, and the regular mirelurks are crabs as tall as a man, and they walk on their hind legs."

She rubs at her nose, thinking, and adds, "I'm not sure if the giant ants count. I know the fire ants were the result of a scientist tinkering with regular ants. For all I know the giant ants might be more of the same. And I'm pretty sure deathclaws were an artificially created species."

"I'm used to mutations that make animals much more intelligent and give them one or two psychic abilities, but don't change their size, you see. And some people say insects can't get any bigger because their circulatory system is too inefficient."

He doesn't know about the giant lungfish yet.

"How terrifyingly literal is the 'fire' in these 'fire ants'?"

ooc: i'm for bed, continue in the morning?

"I haven't seen any animals with psychic abilities. The mirelurk kings have this... scream, kind of... that doesn't seem like it could be entirely natural, but I've never been able to bring myself to dissect one and find out about its throat," says Ellen.

Then he asks the big question, and she wrinkles her nose in disgust. "I've seen the soldier ants from the Grayditch colony spew a cone of fire at least as long as a very large pre-War car," she says. "The nest guardians were even worse, but those things were the size of Brahmin. And all of it because he was trying to switch off the genes to make them grow unnaturally large and somehow gave them the ability to breathe fire instead- and they got out into the wild. The man had no clue whatsoever about proper scientific protocols and controls."

ooc: fine by me!

"It's one of the better-documented effects of psitanium ore, inducing psychic abilities in animals. Come to think of it, that includes fire-breathing.

"He was ... trying to make the ants smaller again? I guess that would make sense under the circumstances. Are 'normal'-sized ants extinct? Not that that's any kind of excuse for letting something even worse out into the wild."

"There are a few species of ants that are an inch long or smaller," says Ellen. "The small ants and the radroaches were the only living animals I saw until I was nineteen years old. I've seen small ants in other places, too, so it's not just the Vault they're living in."

"It's not my field, but I know people who would love to study your world's ecosystem in detail.

"What's people's general strategy for dealing with the mutated wildlife? Are there organized efforts to reconstruct the old ecosystem, or at least make the one you have less dangerous and more diverse?"

Ellen exhales. "Unfortunately," she says, "there's not really the resources to do that- beyond people carrying very big guns and setting traps where they can. I've been working with the one pocket of really green vegetation that I ever found in the Capital area, trying to spread the seeds outward to give the plant life a hand up, and I've had one of the gods from the Bar come and visit the Wasteland- he put in a lot of plants of his own, and they're doing okay, but most of them seem to be either getting eaten by the native animals first or producing mutated seed, so that's slow going. There's a woman in the northwestern Wasteland who's been studying deathclaws for years now, so she's about the only person who really seems to know their life cycle and group structure well enough to have any ideas about how to curb their danger. The last yao guai researcher I heard of got eaten, though."

Sasha gets a thoughtful expression on his face.

"I ... may actually be able to help there," he says. "At least in terms of keeping dangerous animals, mutated or not, away from farms and towns and so on. We have an experimental device that repels animals with psychic waves. It only works on relatively unintelligent species, but it might still do you some good. I can get you a few prototypes if you're willing to test them and let us know how it goes -- and if that goes well, we'd provide the plans. Unlike a lot of psychic gadgets it doesn't need Psitanium."

"That's a thought," says Ellen, sitting up. "Deathclaws are pretty smart, and yao guai at least have some measure of common sense, but we still have trouble with giant mole rats coming at farms and chewing through everything- and then there's the scorpions. If we could even just keep the mole rats and radscorpions out..."

"It was designed to keep predators out of a camp for small children, so I'm not sure how well it will work on herbivores, but it ought to be adjustable to work. It does work on my world's arthropods, though. I'll make sure to get you all the notes we have on adjusting it, as well as the device itself."

"They're really aggressive herbivores, if that makes any difference," Ellen says. "One of them tried to bite me in the face once. While I was standing up. I'll let you know what the results are regardless, since there's always ants and scorpions and things to count as a baseline."

"We were going for a device that responded to predator behavior, but we were never sure that was what it did. It will be an interesting test."

"I"m good with that," Ellen says. "Is there anything else I should be aware of?"

"The prototypes we have are battery-powered. For long-term installation you'd probably want solar panels instead, but that's an easy design change."

He frowns at his drink a bit.

"Anyone who gets a headache immediately upon walking into the device's operating range should be screened for latent psychic abilities. That's all I can think of right now."