Dear Diary,
Out of the wasteland rose the walls of Megaton like molerat poo on a brown, lumpy molerat poo backround. Not quite the shimmering city of lights I had expected. I hoped the city walls were deliberately boring to make the surprise of inside, even better. The guard robot on the city gates didn’t say anything about my shoes or my age or whether I needed a shower and let me in.
Megaton: Such a hole they named it after what made it.
With a name like Megaton I expected it to be mega-cool and tonnes of fun. For whatever reason, Spirit Guide had kept what it was actually like to himself. It was anything but. He said something about ineffable mystery. Ineffable, my gorgeous, well toned butt.
It was named after the unexploded nuclear bomb that sits in a pool of radioactive water at the bottom of the bloody big ditch made by other bombs that landed there first – right in the centre of town. I mean, what kind of Darwin-Award-Winning turkey moves closer to an unexploded atom bomb, thinking it would be a nice place to bring up the kids?
Religious types, apparently. There were people praying to the bomb and the local cult’s church was built an arm’s length away. Spirit Guide said something about this being a nice emphasis on the evolutionary disadvantage of the belief reflex. I just thought it was dumb to stand in a puddle when you could be sitting in a bar.
When I first got into town, I was met by the Sheriff who also claimed to be the Mayor. Suspicious! My last relationship with big fish in a small puddle of radioactive water didn’t go so well. One of us is going to have to watch their step.
The doctor’s a grumpy bastard. I went in to his surgery, ready for him to live up to his hippocampus oath and he charged me through the nose for some second-hand rubbish. And talk about ripe for infection. I needed a tetanus shot after just looking at the operating table.
Half the shops are closed. The residents are dags or ugly or both. I don’t see any girls my age and everything’s either really uphill, or really downhill. What’s the point of putting on a nice dress if all you’re going to do is clamber around in the mud in unflattering ways? This place sucks worse than school and that sucked hard.
Spirit Guide told me I had to go to the local bar to pick up information on Dad. While I was milling around trying to attract the right sort of attention, a well dressed guy who said he was a property developer started talking to me. I liked him immediately. He had class. Spirit Guide said I was the worst judge of character, ever, but I haven’t seen him winning any popularity contests lately so he can shut the hell up about who I hang out with.
The property developer had a hat and nice glasses and a really nice suit. You could tell he was making his way in the wasteland. He did talk a bit, though. He was yammering on about all sorts of stuff I didn’t care about but once we got to the crunch, he wanted me to use a device he gave me to do something “de” with. Either defuse or detonate the atom bomb… I’m not sure which. I had some other stuff to do first. I told him I’d think about it.
Turned out that the guy who owned the bar was the guy I had to talk to about Dad. He was even more of a bastard than the town Doctor. I wasn’t able to convince him to just tell me, he wanted 100 caps for the info. I didn’t have a hundred and told him so. He got all, “Well come back when you do.”
So I went off to trade some gear to make the 100 caps and it’s not that easy in a town where all the damn shops are closed, but I managed with a mixture of trade and... never mind.
So I went back to the bar-owning-bastard with the cash and he said the price was now 300 caps because I was obviously willing to go a long way for the information.
As it turned out, he was right. I was willing to go quite a long way. After I’d gone through his clothes for loose change, I went through his computer and found what I needed. Then I went through the clothes of everybody else in the bar, for stuff I might need ‘just in case’. Liam Neeson always said, “Be prepared.”
The nice property developer had already left by the time the trouble started which was another sign to me of his good judgement, but I had paid attention when he told me where to meet him later. It sounded nice. He said I could meet him at Tenpenny Towers. I liked the sound of that. It’d have to be better than that dump of a town.
I realised I might’ve burnt my bridges in Megaton a bit and all I can say about that is, their loss, not mine. After taking drugs that made me smarter (don’t they all?) I attached the thing that the property dude had given me to the bomb and left the stinkin’ pile of crap in my dust.
Tenpenny Towers, here I come. I hope you have a nice lobby bar and restaurant. And a shower. Holy crap I need a shower.
Ovewriting data.
Jules.
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