Constantine sounds like a real prick. Then again, Langston has some weird stuff going on. Not that this warrants getting slammed to the ground. Maybe the ghoul did some experiments with one of Constantine's family members...

Wow. You know, there is some weird [censored] which used to go on in some of those vaults for sure. In Fallout 3 for instance, that one vault with all the cloned humans, all with the same names.

A-ha, there it is. Family members. I don't like Constantine at all, but he does have some points.

Sheesh.

@SubRosa - That's a pretty good analogy with Operation Paperclip. Maybe that was a subconscious influence on how I set it up. The name "Harbingers" just came to me one day and I thought that was the perfect name for them and their goals.

@Renee - "Ha ha, Gary!" "Gary?" "Oh, Gaaaary!" Yep, every so often a good old-fashioned, moustache-twirling bad guy obsessed with power is fun to see, but it's much more interesting to give villains a motive.



Sorry for the delay as real life has kept me busy the past few weeks, but I've got the end of Chapter 19 right here for you all.

Chapter 19: Capital Punishment

***Chapter 19.3***

Mariah opened her eyes at the sounds of piercing screams and roaring fire. She was already standing, frantically looking around at a settlement on the brink of destruction. She started running around trying to find the source of the screams so she could help, but there was no one around. Mariah ended up in front of a charred two-story building, sensing some sort of personal tie to the place but unable to pinpoint what it was. That’s when it struck her.

The building was where Mariah had grown up in. This settlement was once her home.

Mariah’s father and mother had done a lot of work on a crumbling Pre-War home, like many of the other people in the settlement had done for their residences. Mariah lived with her parents and younger sister and brother up until she was a teenager—when raiders hopped up on chems came and laid waste to the entire settlement. While she had thought about her lost home and family many times over the years, this dream was the most vivid and realistic of them all. Mariah tried to reassure herself that this is all it was: A dream.

“Hello, Mariah,” a voice familiar to her intoned to her left. At that point, the screams around the settlement stopped.

“D-dad?” Mariah turned quickly to him. “Oh my God!”

Mariah gasped at the sight of her father, but not because of the reunion with a loved one. Her father looked like a shambling corpse. Some bits of flesh across his body were missing, showcasing the muscle once protected by his skin. Bullet holes riddled his chest, and the left side of his face was charred from the smoldering flames engulfing the area. Other parts of his skin were black and blue. Yet there her dad was, talking to her as if nothing was wrong.

“Look at you, all grown up,” Mariah’s father said. But he didn’t talk to her as if he was happy to see her. He sounded vindictive and passive-aggressive. “I guess that’s what happens when you get to live. When you run away as everyone who cared about you dies horrifically.”

“Wha…what?” Mariah was taken aback, still processing her father’s form. “I…I didn’t…you told me to run! I didn’t want to leave you all behind, but you said you would hold off the raiders!”

“And here you go again, telling yourself all these lies so you don’t have to face the truth,” her father said, shaking his head. He spat on the ground. “Is that how you get yourself to sleep at night?”

“How could you say that, dad?” Mariah shook her head violently trying to wake herself up. “No. No, this is a dream. I know what you told me. This is all just in my head,” she said quietly to herself.

Somehow, her dad still heard her words. “Oh, a dream, huh? You think it was a dream for me? For your mother? For your siblings? Hey, Jennifer! Our so-called daughter thinks this is all a dream!”

“Is that right, Allen?” Mariah’s mother said, leaning against their house. She wasn’t there when Mariah looked at the house, but she instantaneously appeared at the sound of her name.

“Mom?” Mariah said in a quivering voice at the sight of her mother. Similarly to her father, Mariah’s mother looked like a corpse. Yet she leaned nonchalantly against the front wall of their home with her arms folded.

“Our darling daughter finally decided to come home. That guilt sure must be heavy on you, dear.” But her mother didn’t speak out of concern, either. She sounded resentful. “Off to play hero, again? You always played hero with Leah and Quinn. They looked up to you so, so much. And yet you left them behind. Your father and I, too.”

This is my mind playing tricks on myself. It always does. Mariah thought to herself. Just be calm. It’s not real. I know what happened.

“And now she tries so desperately to be a savior once again. Like she couldn’t be for us,” Mariah’s father chided. He said it right next to Mariah’s ear, startling her as she didn’t hear him move. “All of us. All gone. You think you’re some messiah? Why don’t we ask Leah and Quinn?” He pointed behind Mariah.

As Mariah whirled around, her siblings were suddenly there as well. They, too, looked like they had just risen from the dead. Mariah was the oldest of the three, followed by her brother Quinn and sister Leah. “Why did you leave us, M? You were supposed to always be there for us,” they said in unison, calling Mariah by the nickname her family often used for her.

“I didn’t leave you!” Mariah cried out, kneeling on the ground to reach their height. Despite their decaying appearance, she touched her siblings’ outside shoulders to try to reassure them. “Dad told us all to run, remember? I tried finding you, but I couldn’t.”

“Heroes don’t make excuses, M,” Mariah’s mother said bitterly, now directly behind her. “You just always go running around the wastes trying to make amends for the past. Trying to make something of yourself. But you can’t. We died while you lived. You’re not a hero. You never were.” She then leaned right into Mariah’s face. “And you never will be,” she said with a sense of finality.

Mariah didn’t have any words. She often struggled to reconcile her memory of what happened to her settlement with what the critic in her mind told her. Mariah’s own mind basically gaslighted her. It often left her wondering if she really was weak and a coward.

As Mariah sat there in the dark cloud of her thoughts, she sensed another person’s presence. She turned to some figure that she could make out very little of. Mariah couldn’t tell what exactly they were wearing as it was somehow obfuscated to her. The face appeared as nothing but static and then colored, vertical bars. It was like what she had heard about those Pre-War things called televisions showing if a TV program wasn’t appearing on the screen.

“Who are you?” That was all Mariah could muster. She thought it strange that none of her family were reacting, but when she turned all four of them were lying on the ground dead. It was as if they had never gotten up to begin with. “Tell me what the hell is going on!” Mariah demanded of this mysterious figure, quickly facing him again. “Answer me!” Whoever this figure was, he had not been there in reality when her settlement burned to the ground—or so she thought, at least. Mariah was questioning her recollection of events again.

The figure simply extended their right hand calmly, palm facing up. When they spoke, it was clearly a male’s voice, echoing as if multiple copies of him were speaking out of his mouth at the same time. He sounded like his voice had been modulated to sound deeper—while mostly human, there seemed to be a robotic quality to it as well. “Come with me, Mariah.”

Mariah was still scared, yet she strangely started feeling calmer at the sound of his voice. “Who…who are you?”

“Someone who seeks to cast a light into this dark, depraved world. Like you,” the strange man—if you could call him that—said reassuringly. “I know how it feels to be gripped by a debilitating sense of failure. That all my efforts mean nothing. But I can show you how to overcome all of this. How you can be a part of something greater than yourself. How you can bring true change to this carcass of a planet so that humanity no longer kills itself over the scraps.” The man somehow extended his hand farther out to her. “Come with me. Together we can cleanse this world. We can repair the damage done by the Great War.”

“What are you talking about? How can that be possible?” Mariah had no idea what all of that meant, but she felt compelled to touch the man’s hand. Suddenly, everything around her disintegrated into a bright white light.



Mariah woke up with a jolt, finding herself panting heavily in a hot sweat. She was laying on a wooden floor in the bedroom of a decrepit metal shack. Moonlight poked through holes in the roof. When she finally got her bearings, Mariah cried quietly for what seemed to her like an hour.

After her outpouring of emotion, she got herself up off the floor and brushed herself off. If it weren’t for the moonlight and some holes in the wall, the room might have been pitch black. Next to a mattress that Mariah figured she had rolled off of in her nightmare was a cracked mirror. She gently grabbed its handle and found a smooth spot to look at herself in. What was once beautiful, blonde hair had been matted down and considerably darkened, caked with dirt and sweat. Mariah ran her hand through her hair to straighten it out and remove some of the grime. Mariah then walked over to the wall and peeked through one of the holes. Surveying the surroundings revealed a bunch of rundown buildings, an empty street, dilapidated shacks, and overgrowth of flora.

She was in “the Zoo.”

***End of Chapter 19***

Yeah, GARY!!!! That's the vault I'm talking about; everyone's named Gary!

Whoa this is intense. It's a dream, right? Yesh it is. Phew. A very vivid dream. Dad's not being very nice. Mom's not being very nice. You've written this part very well, Rader.

And mom's wrong about Mariah never becoming a hero, Mariah's already done heroic things!

Ah crap she's in the Zoo. 🦏 What is this Zoo, anyway?

It feels like this is a dream (well, nightmare) that Mariah is starting within. Yep, bad times from the past, the unhinged her from an 'ordinary' life, or at least what passes for such in the wasteland.

And so here we see the inciting event that pushes Mariah to be who she is. Her need to save who she can, because of who she could not. Plus an unhealthy dose of survivor's syndrome.

Somehow this final messianic figure fills me dread. Maybe it is just Fallout being Fallout, things always get worse.

@Renee - Thank you. Remember that this is just Mariah's mind playing tricks on her. The Zoo is . . . well, you'll see in a moment.

@SubRosa - Yep. I only made a couple short mentions of her past, but I wanted to incorporate it in a way that was more integral to the overall story, not just in how it made her who she is.



My apologies for another delay. If it isn't life getting in the way, sometimes my creative juices aren't flowing. But I've got the next installment right here. Thank you to those who are sticking with this. I know it's a bit difficult to do so considering the erratic schedule I am keeping to. But I will do my best to be more consistent with writing this story.

Chapter 20: Night at the Zoo

It was easy to see why this sprawling prison, a sectioned-off part of the city, was called The Zoo—the area was teeming with ubiquitous plant life and noises of various creatures. No doubt it housed some psychotic individuals, too, whether they deserved to be in this place or not. And Mariah hadn’t even stepped out of the run-down building she was in yet. The feeling of the environment was just that visceral.

“Focus, Mariah. You can get out of this. You’ve gotten out of sticky situations before,” Mariah said out loud to herself, still shaking herself out of the feelings she just experienced from her dream. She wasn’t injured, which was a nice start. But when she opened the door of her room, she found someone who wasn’t so lucky. The corpse of a man on the floor of this main room was still clad in Temple of New Life robes, though it wasn’t Roger. That blood on the floor in the Temple that Mariah and company found before Constantine ambushed them was most likely his, but where was he? What did Constantine and his underlings do to him?

Mariah tried to push the pessimistic thoughts away as she focused on the task at hand. She noticed that there was a book in the left hand of the dead apostle. Looking closer revealed it was that central tome that Roger had shown her before, the Synthesis. “Maybe there’s something here that can tell me more,” Mariah said to herself. She doubted that it would shine any light on her situation, but she needed to try something, anything. The passage that the dead man’s thumb was on was one of the many sermons—if that was what they were called—from The Redeemer, this mystery man who founded the Temple of New Life:

The fundamental flaw of this world is that the Old World refuses to die. It desperately attempts to cling to survival through the last vestiges of humanity. They may not realize it. They may not even have a strong concept of what the Old World really was. But the roots of the ideologies and strife of the Old World persist. Instead of creating something brand new, humans insist on rebuilding the old, even if unintentionally.

But that is why we are building something different, something wholly other. The only way to free ourselves of what destroyed us is to understand what destroyed us in the first place and why. Every worldview of those before-years—political, religious, areligious, cultural, and so on—in some way led to the Old World’s demise. All these old concepts must be shed for humanity to truly rebuild and become something greater. Otherwise, we will repeat the mistakes of the past.

Take heart, dear reader. While those individuals and groups still shackled to the greed, lust, and short-sightedness of the Old World will do all they can to stop us, we are on track for a much greater purpose. Know that you are a critical part of this trajectory. One day, our efforts will be vindicated when we build the New World and show others the Light.

It felt as if the very words of The Redeemer, this enigmatic man so central to the Temple of New Life, spoke right to Mariah. It was a very strange feeling to her, one that she had seldom experienced before.

But unfortunately, it gave her no direction for how to save herself from her current predicament. Mariah turned her attention away from it, standing up and turning to the front door of her shack. She took a deep breath. “Well, here goes nothing.”

[Battlespire Soundtrack – Into the Spire (Caitiff)]

Save for moonlight, only flickering streetlights lit up the dilapidated street that she stepped out into. One of them illuminated a half-eaten corpse of a man along with a severely lacerated Radfrog, lying next to an irradiated, hunched-over palmetto tree. Mutations caused the palmetto to grow several giant branches. The Radfrog must have been eating the dead body, but what killed the Radfrog?

Next to the corpse was a .357 magnum and some ammo cartridges. How a weapon could get into a prison was beyond her, but she wasn’t going to question it. “Perfect,” Mariah muttered to herself. But when she reached for the equipment, a sudden rusting startled her. She quickly looked up and fell back as the palmetto tree swung one of its branches at her! Sharp palmetto leaves almost doled out the same fate to Mariah as it did to the Radfrog. “Holy s---!” Mariah yelled, catching her breath as her heart rate suddenly accelerated. She quickly covered her mouth following her outburst, remembering that more dangerous flora—or fauna, or other prisoners—could come after her at any moment.

Next to Mariah was a large tree branch, though not from the mutant palmetto. It was long enough for her to use to pull the gun and ammo toward her, which she did. With the equipment in her possession, Mariah got off the ground and dusted herself off. I guess the best option is to follow down the street, or what’s left of it, Mariah thought, now keeping her commentary inside her head. As she traversed down the path, she turned to look at the palmetto, which felt like it was looking right at her despite having no eyes. Happy to get the metaphorical last word, she scrunched up her face and flipped both of her middle fingers toward the botanical assailant before continuing down the road.



Mariah had no means of gauging how much time had passed. She surprisingly had not yet encountered any enemies as she walked down the tatterdemalion street and her thoughts turned to Valentina and their Quillback companion. Mariah couldn’t help but feel pessimistic about what happened to them, but she was determined to find them before leaving this prison.

Mariah then made it to an old intersection of what used to be storefronts, now mostly rubble. Most of them were connected to each other. Holding her weapon to her side and crouching down, she quickly ducked into one of the buildings, hoping to find anything she could use for armor. In the back of the former store, behind a counter, was a dead body with a note. Reading the note, Mariah found that she had died by suicide by shooting herself in the head, distraught at her unjust imprisonment. Mariah put a hand on the deceased woman’s shoulder. “I’ll avenge you. I’ll avenge this whole city,” Mariah said under her breath.

The note also gave permission to access a stash hidden in a closed but unlocked giant safe in the corner of the room. The woman hoped that somebody else could make good use of it, and that’s what Mariah was determined to do. A laser pistol, energy cells, and makeshift metal armor were stashed inside the safe. The woman’s firearm was also a .357 magnum but with a scope, so Mariah emptied it of its bullets and took the scope and spare ammunition lying around as well.

Suddenly, Mariah caught a whiff of smoke coming from the east. Equipping her .357 magnum and donning her new armor, Mariah went back outside and followed the smell, crouching and hugging the wall. When she got further down the street, she found a campsite across an open way with a small tribe of people hanging around it. Mariah looked down her scope to get a better look. The surrounding ruins had effectively turned the campsite into a dead end. The only connecting streets were the one Mariah was coming from and a large street ahead and to her left, separated by a median strip lined with dead trees.

These people weren’t human, at least not fully. They looked a lot like the humanoids she had encountered in the lab when she and her allies were infiltrating Old Tallahassee in the first place, humans with animalistic features like scaly faces and webbed feet. They were unfriendly then, and they were certainly going to be unfriendly now.

They also had Mariah’s Quillback companion. It could’ve been any Quillback, but there was a tranquilizer dart still in its side. Unless the Harbingers or the New State of Florida had thrown another sedated mutant porcupine in this place, it was definitely Mariah’s buddy. If he hadn’t still been out cold, he almost certainly would have evaded capture with his spiny defense measures.

Mariah suddenly realized they planned to eat him!

“Oh, no you don’t!” Mariah said. Without giving it a second thought, she darted behind a rusted car that was closer to the campsite. Making sure her gun was fully loaded, she aimed down the scope and fired straight into the head of one of the tribesmen, killing him instantly. His compatriots got up in a panic and frantically scanned their surroundings for Mariah, but she picked off a couple more. The loud sound of the .357 magnum was undoubtedly going to draw unwanted attention, so Mariah tried to kill the tribe quickly so she could rescue the Quillback and find somewhere else to hide.

But as usual, a sudden complication arose.

[Wasteland 3 Soundtrack – Encounter Combat]

As Mariah reloaded her weapon, an arrow struck the windshield of the car she hid behind. “Whoa!” She exclaimed as she flinched. She saw to her left more of these human-animal hybrids coming down a connecting street. Several of them had bows and arrows but most were relegated to primitive melee weapons. They must have been a part of the tribe that Mariah was making short work of, coming back from searching for more food.

“It’s a full-blood!” One of the hybrids grunted. “Kill her and add her to the meal!” The tribesmen at the campsite banded together with their comrades and ran toward Mariah’s position. There were too many of them and she didn’t want to risk getting struck by their ranged weaponry, so she fled back down the street she came. But as she sprinted, she had no idea where she was going to go to get away from these hybrids. Some of the buildings were inaccessible and others might turn out to be dead ends.

Then a familiar voice called out to her from one of the buildings. “Mariah!”

“Val?” Mariah called back out, gasping as she was running out of breath. She spotted Valentina in a two-story building to her left.

“Get in here!” Valentina motioned for Mariah to come inside a building the former had been using as a base of sorts.

Mariah burst through the door as the two of them slammed it shut and locked it. “Am I . . . glad to . . . see you,” Mariah said, panting between every couple of words.

“Likewise, but we can exchange pleasantries later. The windows were already secured, but I need your help to barricade the door,” Valentina said as she started pushing on a heavy hutch. Mariah pushed with her to get to fortify their defense. “There’s a water fountain here if you need it, though it isn’t exactly clean.”

“Not . . . surprising,” Mariah said. She was going to have to accept the rads that came with the drink as she took several big gulps.

“What were you thinking taking on those people?” Valentina chastised Mariah. “They’re insane! I saw them slaughter some other prisoners earlier. And they were making these weird animal noises. Why would you—”

“They have Quinn!” Mariah blurted out.

Valentina cocked her head to the side in confusion. “Who’s Quinn?”

Mariah realized that she had only just now named her Quillback friend. Whether it was subconsciously a result of her dream she had prior to waking up, she named the Quillback after her deceased brother. “Oh . . . that’s what I named the quillback, I guess. Just now, actually. That was my little brother’s name.”

“Oh. That’s really sweet to honor him like that, Mariah.” Valentina said, touched.

“Well, I had a dream where . . .” It struck Mariah that now was not a good time to explain her nightmare. “I’ll tell you about that later. We need to figure out what to do about these guys.”

“Come to think of it, they look a lot like those people we saw in the underground lab. Maybe they’re some of Langston’s experiments.”

Langston hadn’t even crossed Mariah’s mind since she woke up. “Probably are. I still can’t believe it. I mean, I know he worked for Ezra and the Old Guard and all, but I didn’t think that would be the nature of his work. He said he just worked on automatons, didn’t he?”

“Yes. And if we see him again, we’re going to give him a piece of our minds,” Valentina said. “I don’t care if he is contrite now. He’s going to face justice.”

“Oh, I’ll give him more than a piece of my mind,” Mariah said, cracking her knuckles. “Waller, too.”

Valentina sighed. “People in the GCU like Sergeant Waller make me miss people like Commander Bertrand and Jacob even more.”

Their conversation was cut short as the hybrids started banging on the doors and boarded-up windows. Mariah and Valentina could tell that their defenses weren’t going to hold up for long.

Welcome back, Rader. Good to see you. ☢ It's weird how last time a story was posted in this thread was September. It seems like months and months ago. Maybe because it's been so cold already this mid-fall. 🍁🍂

No worries about lack of creative thoughts. Either the words are there or they aren't. Only thing is you might want to remind us of names, what's going on, etc. For instance, I remember Langston (the ghoul scientist) was getting the [censored] beat out of him for ... I don't remember why. Experiments, I think. Yeah, he was experimenting on live, human subjects? And there was a colonel who'd caught them as they roamed through Tallahassee. And they're all in BIG trouble.

One of the reasons Fallout: Florida is awesome is (within my own mind) it strengthens the events which go on in my own Fallout story. It's like we're building upon the fictional post-apocalyptic world, chapter by chapter.

The part where it says "and Mariah hadn't even stepped out of this part of the run-down place ..." indicates she's at least not tied down or locked up. Phew. I like how there are apostles in this story! That's something we don't have in modern religious times.

Radfrog. Oh wow, she's got a gun. Mariah's a full-blood. They're fighting now. Weird how this 'prison' allows so much free roaming. Why do I get the feeling they're all being watched? Maybe that's why this is called The Zoo.

Valentina, and the quillback. I believe that animal's gotta be somewhat domesticated. It's real comfortable around people. Even warned them occasionally, iinm.

Uh oh, looks like they're trapped.

The title makes me think of this song.

As soon as you described that mutated tree, I was thinking it was going to attack Mariah!

Quillbacks and complications. Who is M going to attract with all that shooting? Hopefully a friend.

Uh oh, more of the Half Blood tribal cannibals. It might be time for Mariah to relocate...

There's Val! Now that the dynamic duo is barricaded in against the zombie horde, they are going to have to come up with a plan to get out of this sticky situation, and get Quinn back.

Well, well, well, I DO still exist. Goodness, it's been almost 2.5 years since I made an update to Fallout: Florida...

Sorry for those of you following along and wanting more. It's highly doubtful I'm ever going to get around to writing out the whole story.

HOWEVER...

I have had synopses and some extra stuff sitting both in the back of my head AND in documents for all this time. So if people are still interested, I may write the synopses for the rest of the story, as well as recap what has actually been written (with possibly some changes to make a more cohesive story) so that I can at least cap off the story. I'd also add some editor notes as a commentary on my thought processes for why I did certain things the way I did. Think something similar to movie extras where they give you director and actor commentaries on what is going on in the movie.

I know that's not exactly the most satisfying. So, my apologies again. But for myself and for others, I want to put some sort of bookend on all this. It is bothersome to leave something unfinished when people are looking forward to it.