The Gears Keep On Turning.

[Reforged]

The heat, the abhorred heat was going to be a everyday hardship. The soldiers couldn't wear their skin tight jump suit uniforms that adorned them with protective ballistic weave. Instead everyone of Camp Orion were wearing military fatigues, light clothing made for the Mojave desert wasteland. One such soldier was sitting upon of the platform barriers with a desert camouflage anti-materiel rifle. He had been picking off Cazador monstrosities with high-explosive rounds. That bolt-action rifle exploded forth from the muzzle brake after squeezing cool to the touch trigger. He loved the way the Cazador would explode after being hit. The distance between him and this nest was a couple football fields away, but the man was an expert.


The male sighed as he lowered the weapon down between his legs and pulled the depleted magazine out from the weapon and placed beside the chair he was sitting in. After that, he grabbed a new fully loaded magazine and slapped it back into his weapon but something caught his attention. One of the scribes was trying to set up a communications relay dish in the center of the camp. She was having trouble connecting the power lines to the small fusion generator that was powering the entire camp. He growled with little annoyance as he placed his weapon up against the thick green barrier of the platform before rambling down the black metal steps.


Quickly, with footfalls that stirred up the desert dust, he made his way to the female scribe who was cursing and stomping her boot on the ground. He approached her and quickly moved her away from the connections with a sigh. He looked at her with a narrowed expression as she looked back at him with an apologetic look.


"Commander, no, I have this, you don't-.." Her voice was small and soft but she gave up when the sentinel grabbed the heavy connections under his powerful hands and slammed them together. Just as soon as he did so, the communication relay dish surged with power and came online. The male looked at the scribe and smirked before crossing his large vascular biceps over his large chest. "Look, everyone here helps everyone. If you can't do the job, ask for help." The man patted her shoulder before leaving her be. The camp was nothing but a camp. Their gunship vertibird remained idle and dead in the background while some engineers worked on the rotors on one of the tilt wings. The commander looked at them working and sighed, without it, his men had to walk their patrols or visits to out lining towns and settlements. He needed a miracle worker right now and he would do anything to have one.

 

[Quincunx]

When Sati woke up beneath the sun's belligerent red eye, she wasn't expecting human voices. In this hilly region of the wasteland, she'd taken care to avoid the Legion, and even the NCR - she wasn't feeling like company right now. She could protect herself, in any case.


She was expecting the buzz of cazadors, the hiss of bloatflies. Alpha somethings-or-other to wake her from her sleep. But within the craggy, dust-covered hills, she heard a booming male voice. "If you can't do the job, ask for help." Something some NCR vet would say, maybe her dad. She stood up and looked around as she put her bedroll away. She was surrounded by hills that might've been green at some point, a small depression that would catch what little rain they got. The heat was particularly sweltering today. She made a quick check to see that no enemies were around, listening and sniffing for the characteristic sounds and odors of mutant creatures, and took off her arclight helmet to let her face breathe. (Yes, she'd slept in it. Shit.)


Her mission had been to investigate some flaming wreckage in the distance of Paige, near Nipton. And she'd noticed from walking around it that Nipton was, to say the least, dead. The skin on her arm twitched at the memory, for a needle to harden her arm and her mind against that image. Not now, she told herself. It doesn't mean not ever, it means it's not a good idea right now.


Plan B on one hip and Girl's Best Friend on the other, she moved carefully out of the depression on the far end to avoid alerting whoever was there to her presence. Circling around to the high end that blocked her sight, the image below left her speechless.


It was... a hideout. A camp, really. With a satellite dish set up, presumably by a female who was as petite as her helper was muscular. Residential constructs, and something in the background she'd never seen before that looked like it had some pretty guns and was bigger than the constructs. The inhabitants all wore military garb. Not NCR, but... Brotherhood?


The surprise almost made her need a hit.


She noticed some were staring at her. Oh. Fuck. "Excuse me," she called, figuring her best option was to play nice with such a large potential threat. "What are you guys doing here?"

 

[Reforged]

With only thirty or so yards between her and the sentinel-commander, a machine gun turret had detected her. It's inner workings, biometric scanners and built in power supply rumbling like an angry bumblebee, were moving it towards her. Green lights turned yellow as it aimed its triple barrels at her and sounded off with a few warning beeps. Morgan looked up quickly to place a hand on his over charged laser pistol but he cocked his head and smirked. This mighty, mighty man had a great judgement of character. He walked up to the turret and manually switched it back on stand-by mode with a simple switch flip behind the ammo barrel. The rumbling turret jerked left and right before lowering it's barrels down at the ground.


"What are we doing here?" He replied back but with a bit of a boom behind his already deep voice. He had to speak over the rumbling machine that spat hot lead. He looked over his shoulder spotting some of the knights dressed in desert gear pointing their laser rifles down at the ground but were waiting for any order. Morgan gave them no such order but instead dismissed them with a single hand wave. He had so much authority over them but it was something that never got to his head. He saw himself as their servant, making sure that their needs came first. How could you expect to have an efficient killing squad when they were not kept up with.


The male still haven't answered her question but since she had asked nicely he felt she deserved an answer worthy of her manners. He wiped a line of sweat from his brow before licking his dry chapped lips. "This is our camp, Camp Orion. We're here to aid the N.C.R." He ended his comment quickly, almost too quickly. He maybe have a good knack for judging character but how could he detect a spy? She could be with the Legion and he could have already said too much. He quickly turned the tables around and spoke. His eyes slowly narrowing while he crossed his large, muscular arms across his robust chest. "What are you doing here?" Said the sentinel with a inquisitive tone in his profound voice.

 

[Quincunx]

Sati jumped as the turrets and barrels were pointed at her, and didn't let her guard down as the man called them down. "My name is Sati Garg of Paige's Church of Mary. I don't really have identification, but you might notice I'm too, well, well-nourished to be a slave, and too female to be a Legionary." She'd honestly been curious about the Brotherhood - all those shiny old guns - but she wasn't sure she liked how jumpy they were. Who could blame them, though? She'd just popped up over the hill wearing a MFC bandoleer, with grenades in her pockets and guns on her hips.


"NCR, huh?" she said, wondering if she could survive this encounter if she stalled for time and got them to let their guard down a bit. "Paige has been looking to join for a while." All of it except the church. Well, she kept that to herself. "Protection. But what I'm looking for is something large and formerly very fiery that fell out of the sky near Nipton. Do you know anything about that?" In what she hoped wasn't a mechanical way, she let her arms hang limply at her sides, not on her pockets or weapons, and planted her feet a bit apart to show she was at least marginally comfortable.

 

[Reforged]

The male shuffled his combat boots a bit into the dry, light brown earth before rubbing the five o'clock shadow on his face. Neither his knights or scribes have spotted anything of the sort. If they had, he would have been notified of it. He looked up at her and shook his head from left to right with an apologetic look. "No, one of my men would have told me. I couldn't have been our vertibird, we managed to land ours after the left engine blew out its rotor and turbo exchange shaft." The sweaty male replied with a raspy voice due to not lubricating his throat properly before speaking. It was this damn heat and so he took his green cloth covered canteen from his back and unscrewed it before bringing it to his mouth. He snapped his head back and allowed the cool water to slide down his throat and into the pit of his stomach.


As he brought the canteen back to his back where the clip would slide over his belt he remembered then about his manners. "Well, you have a point about who you are not, so, I guess I can invite you for a sit down and some water. Come on, tell me more about this fiery UFO you saw." He motioned her to follow him before he turned his large back to her. He proceeded back towards the center of his camp and as he did he passed a few knights who saluted him. He saluted back the traditional U.S. Army style rather than the BoS's own version. He finally stopped in front of a large sun reflecting, aluminium cooler with the markings for H2O on it's front. The tab was already popped into he top and with a gentle slap as if he was slapping the ass of his lover, he smiled handsomely.


"This, Sati, is our Atmospheric Water Generator or a AWG. Uses the humidity in the air to produce water inside this tank after filtering the microorganisms but since the humidity is so low here, we produce little water so we're on reserves." He inspected the AWG from top to bottom. He wondered if Sati would understand, but he wasn't about to assume she was some idiot waster. He was going to give her the benefit of the doubt. He waited for her, waited to see if she had an empty canteen or to be rejected after offering her some of their reserved water.

 

[Quincunx]

Sati followed the bulky man towards the cooler. figured it'd be bad for the BoS and the NCR to try to poison the first person who got close to their operation, and that AWG looked legitimate anyways. "So, is it a passive collection process that gets water diffused from the air, or an active one that uses a concentration gradient?" she said quizzically. She offered her canteen, checking twice to make sure she didn't accidentally hand them an MFC grenade. She'd tell him about the townspeople's findings after she soaked up this hospitality.