*warning beep*
ED-NA sees something up ahead.
Feral ghouls... Seven of them. Heading this way. You take
the one on the left.
You gonna get that?
Sure you’re not done showing off?
Or did you only bring six cartridges?
I'll let you handle this one. Unless that fancy tri-beam ran out of batteries.
I can handle a feral ghoul with my bare hands.
And fifty pounds of power armor.
Did I ever tell you about that time ED-NA and I beat up the entire Legion?
I assume ED-NA took out most of 'em.
She's meaner than she looks. Killed all the Legion mongrels before they knew what hit
'em.
You can just step on it now, I guess.
I always feel sorry for the ferals. Go crazy, and the only cure is forty-five caliber brain
surgery.
It's rough even before they go feral. Little perks like living forever don't make up for
the rest of it. Some of the first ghouls are still alive today. Been like that for two
hundred years and haven't gone feral yet, but they all wonder if their clock is ticking...
Makes 'em a little cranky... The Vault Dweller ran in a few of grouchy ones, back in 2162.
Necropolis.
Was called Bakersfield before the war. Not a big town, but big enough to get its own
vault-
- although Vault 12 was actually one of Vault-tec's little pranks. It was designed to keep its
inhabitants alive through a nuclear war, and filter out most of the radiation afterwards.
"Most". You think Vault-tec planned that as some experiment?
Wouldn't put it past 'em. Might have wanted to see how a select gene pool reacts to radiation.
Or maybe they just thought it'd be funny to make a city full of zombies and see how the
rest of society would respond... Even eighty years after the war, people still thought
they were ghosts or reanimated corpses.
Folk were mighty superstitious back then.
Now we know that there's a rational, scientific explanation for ghouls even if the
poindexters can't agree on what it is. Radiation, genetics, the Forced Evolutionary virus? A
little of all three? When the Vault Dweller came to Necropolis looking for a water chip,
the ghouls weren't concerned with existential inquiries like "Why are we here". They were
concerned about a group of mysterious mutants that had arrived in town, shot a whole lot
of them up, and took over the place.
That first generation of super mutants...
And their unseen master...
Last NCR outpost in Nevada. Sure you don't wanna rest?
Gotta keep moving. Wanna be at the Devil's Throat before sunrise.
Aren't you worried I'll kill you in your sleep if we make camp out in the wilds?
Nope. You promised me you'd help catch this thing I'm chasing. You seem like a man of
your word.
I coulda killed you back there when you were reloading your Sequoia.
And you didn't...
So we trust each other now.
Yup.
My rifle feels a little light.
I put a drained microfusion cell in it back in California. Figured you wouldn't feel the
difference with your power armor on.
They all drained, or just that one?
We'll find out if seven deathclaws show up.
Wasn't much trust between those mutants and the citizens of Necropolis, either. The mutants
had come hoping to find a sealed vault with a pure gene pool for their master's experiments.
And the ghouls - they just wanted to be left alone. Their leader, Set, wasn't happy. Hard
to be when the mutants kill off a lot of your people – and then force you to serve them
as a watchdog, looking out for normies to abduct. See, the supermutants thought they
would find an untouched vault full of those – but only faced ghouls.
Set was happy to use The Vault Dweller as cannon fodder against the Super Mutants, to
get his revenge and freedom. But he was a bastard, as his son, Typhon put it – and
was not looking for an equitable exchange.
I'm gonna to eat you up and be singing that 'Happy Tummy' song. I got that happy tummy
..."
Fortunately there were some kindlier souls living beneath Necropolis. They helped The
Vault Dweller find a way to take the chip, and still keep the water flowing in Necropolis.
Only problem was, they had to go through the mutant garrison on top of the Vault...
I guess even The Vault Dweller wasn't prepared for a squad of giant mutants...
Their memoir didn't go into details about what happened during the fight. Had to be
at least half a dozen mutants, with pre-war military weapons...
Would have near impossible to get through a fight like that without losing someone...
Ian's sacrifice made sure they got that damned water chip. Even cleared out the mutants long
enough for some of the ghouls to get out of Necropolis... Then his friends brought the
chip back to Vault 13, and-
*optimistic beep*
No. Things only got worse after that...
The Devil's Throat. On the other side is a little road that heads North, to I-15. Shaves
a few miles off the trip. If we're lucky we'll be able to catch up to your quarry before
they reach Route 70.
I used to look out at this god forsaken hole and think it was end of the world.
If there's anything I learned from the Vault Dweller's quest for the water chip, it's that
the wasteland is a much bigger place that it seems...