One Woman Army

Danse Like No-One is Watching

"Mother-fuc...."

The cut off expletive spilled from my lips through my helmet speaker as the right leg on my power armor suddenly slipped on a loose rock. I kept my footing, and stopped in my tracks, my stomach hitting the ground in alarm as I heard a slight metallic whine coming from the leg of my armor.

Shit.

I looked down, bending over as much as I could to look at the lower control actuator on my power armor frame. I had done a field repair yesterday after running into a squad of Mechanist Robots, but I was confident enough in my repairs after the fact. That was before that pack of feral ghouls decided I looked like lunch, and the roaming band of super-mutants decided to try to take me apart with two suiciders. It was apparently too close of a call as it appeared to have screwed with my patch job. My penchant for shooting first and asking questions later usually paid off, especially with the sheer amount of raiders, robots and super mutants sprinkled so liberally across the face of the Commonwealth. Good thing too, or I'd probably have more problems than I started with. That however, didn't improve my current situation.

Fuck.

Straightening up, I scanned the area, ruined houses here and there along the raised and crumbling highway, grasses finally making a recovery after centuries of radiation exposure. Unless I start scrounging for parts on a regular basis, there is no way in hell that I'm going to be able to keep my armor repaired, and it was coincidentally exactly WHY I was headed toward the ruins of Cambridge.

Several well known corporations held offices or factories outside of or near the Boston suburb, not least of which being Cambridge Polymer or Arc Jet. I needed an armor stand and workbench at this point, especially if I wanted to salvage the frame and not cause more damage. There is a reason power armor frames are everywhere in the Commonwealth. Over 200 years of storage and dry rot or outdoors in the elements after a nuclear war? Yeah, they tend to break...a lot. The X-01 was on one of slightly better quality being an experimental unit, but it was still ancient, no matter how you look at it. I can modify or use existing frames as parts, but they can be tough to spot. Don't even get me started on finding the fusion cores. I was lucky I had a stockpile. I activated the heads up display as I brought the Pipboy map up to pinpoint my location.

Where the Hell am I? Outside Lexington? There should be a Red Rocket close by, right? There.

Not wanting to cause more damage than could be easily repaired, I gingerly limped my armor the couple blocks to the station. I was relieved to find it mostly intact, and with a working garage door and an armor repair center. Concerned, I activated the lever lock on my suit and pressed the release button, the hiss of pressure escaping as the power armor opened at the back. I stepped backward out of the power armor, wearing only the special under armor made to integrate almost seamlessly with the X-01.

I reached into one of the storage slots in the main suit as I surveyed my surroundings, pulling out the folded black leather duster. If I had still been wearing that set of T-45 armor it wouldn't have been possible to store much of anything, but the later series, my specially modified X-01 prototype in particular, had a ton of room to carry crap in it. I pulled the reinforced leather on over my Pipboy as I looked around, even though I highly doubted I'd recognize much of the terrain. Massachusetts looks nothing like it used to, but thankfully the throb I felt in my chest when my brain took in the sight was less now.

The memory of Boston and it's suburbs, the vibrant community with it's rich history was torn to bloody rubble in a blink. The first time I saw it after I awoke, when I made the trip from Sanctuary Hills to Concord, was heartbreaking, bringing me to my knees at the sight. Since then, I've gotten numbed to the change. It still bothers me, knowing the past when so many never knew any differently, but I'm not crippled by it anymore, the stabbing pain of loss now settled to a dull ache.