Chapter 11: Chapter 11

After coming out of the room...refreshed, we picked up Nat and I gave them a tour of the ship.

The girls take priority, I’ll deal with the blood on my hands later. The girls take priority.

The mothership was huge, easily able to house a small town as it was. With some renovations, I could imagine a small city’s worth of people bustling about.

Discounting the cooling corpses strewn all about, the vessel looked comfy enough to be a permanent home, though food and water supplies would definitely be an issue. How the aliens got their own nourishment I don’t know, but if it involves a resupply ship from their home planet or whatever, I had ideas on handling that.

I’d have to make doubly sure to thoroughly go through everything in their food stocks though, to be safe, especially if the rumors of them harvesting abductees for meat was true.

Their cargo hold and attached disposal section would’ve easily been a playground for the girls to scavenge through, if not for the compactors and incinerators nearby. As it was, we planned to go dig for loot at a later date, once the tour was done. I already eyed a few nifty things that might be worth keeping in catalogue.

The rest of the ship was quite boring for the girls. Piper brightened up a bit at seeing the armory, but remembered that I had already cloned a small pile of weapons at the bridge. They found the drone production facility noisy and only mildly interesting, and I only took them to the ship’s cryo labs, telling them to stay away from cryo storage until I cleared it.

Nat nodded obediently, but Piper gave an empathic look as she took and squeezed my hand.

The rest of the tour was finding usable facilities, like the toilets and showers. The toilets we eventually found were closet-sized rooms with something that vaguely looked like a toilet bowl that vacuumed up waste into pipes that led to who-knows-where.

Thankfully for my peace of mind there weren’t any mysterious food dispensers connected to the ship.

Bathing was a weird thing too. The Zetan equivalent to a shower or bath was a flexible tube attached to a nozzle blasting air strong enough to strip paint. Or maybe it wasn’t meant to be held so close? Anyway, the closest thing to a proper shower was found in the holding cells. Each cell had essentially a sprinkler system hidden in the ceiling for clean water to wash the cell and drain off into holes in the corners.

I cleared out the corpses in the holding cells and the girls helped with clearing up the clutter. A quick return to their cargo hold and I found us towels, soap and shampoo from various periods in Earth’s history. Designating one cell as our bathroom for now, I left the girls to enjoy probably the cleanest shower they’ve ever had while I busied myself back in the storage and trash piles to sift for pretties.

It was weird, after days of travelling like a protagonist in a Fallout post-apocalypse, to find a Pip-Boy only now, in a junk heap of all things. Its interior padding had dried blood crusted all over it, but other than that looked pretty new. Reset to a pristine state, it gave a cheap and tacky plastic feel to it, as if it were some Chinese knock-off meant to fool kids and gullible tourists.

The Pip-Boy worked though, the green screen flickered with an audible hum to show the familiar UI. Console mode revealed a lot of weird information, but I decided to decipher that later.

I continued digging around and at the end of it I had a small cache of Pip-Boys from both storage shelves and trash piles. I also found a few tattered mattresses, some hopefully more comfy clothes for Piper and Nat (no, I really didn’t find any lingerie and imagined Piper in them, honest), some clothes for myself, and more interestingly, prop or cosplay grimdark armor inspired from Souls game or other similarly gothic media. It looked comfy enough, and if I tweaked its values I’m sure it’d be practical enough.

After a few minutes of digging, I left the small pile of salvage by the entry, then grabbed the clothes and headed back to check on the girls. I returned in time to see Nat giggling as Piper dried her down playfully, both sisters having bright smiles on their faces.

Looking at their happy moment together, I felt a sense of pride and accomplishment that went far beyond grinding video games in my past life. I’ve easily come to accept being in an unrealistic post-apocalypse as a reality, and seeing two girls who were more than just named NPCs be so carefree despite the shitty experiences they had to deal with recently, or the shitty world they lived in…

I’m glad Piper didn’t care much about the blood on my hands.

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My crotch became uncomfortable again as I remembered us kissing. It felt dirty, like I was taking advantage of her (because I probably was), but...was it really such a bad thing to give in to just a kiss, or even if I wanted to go beyond that?

Yes, yes it was you desperate twit. I'm not going to ruin her life just because I want to stick my dick in something.

I broke from my musing when the girls noticed me and Nat ran towards me. Her towel almost slipped off of her as she laughed brightly. She stopped just in front of me, bouncing as she exclaimed her experiences. “Sev! The water’s so nice! The soap and stuff felt great! I feel so clean! The towel’s so fluffy!”

Not wanting to ruin her fresh cleanliness, I fought the urge to ruffle her hair. Piper walked up to adjust her sister’s towel before beaming a smile of her own to me. “Yeah, it’s so different having to wash myself and not immediately feel grimy from toweling down or the air around us. Thanks for letting us enjoy this, Sev.”

“Yeah! Thanks Sev!” Nat echoed. “We can do this again later, right?”

“Of course,” I replied, giving a smile of my own. “It needs a bit of renovating, but I’m planning on having this ship as our new home, if you girls are fine with it.” They nodded eagerly. I clapped my hands to finalize the decision. “Right then, so girls, let me officially welcome you to our new home, the Tupile!”

Nat cheered along, but Piper gave a curious smirk. “Who’s Tupile?”

I waved off the question. “Just a stupid reference. If I ever find the books, I’ll let you go through them and so you can cringe at me.”

With the girls refreshed and in high spirits, we got back to the living quarters and I got us lunch. It went without saying that fried chicken from my times was far superior to whatever abomination the wasteland cooked up, and like with the other foods from my past life, the girls had quickly taken a liking to it.

A short rest after the meal and we started working. I left the girls to salvage whatever they liked in storage and disposal, while I tried figuring out the bridge’s many controls. I took a Pip-Boy along, inevitably fiddling with it after I got stuck with the more advanced and non-intuitive features for the various control stations.

Steering the ship and using its weapons was an easy enough thing, but I had no progress with how to use its communications, external teleporters, or properly decipher the more intricate details of the ship’s status. Bad enough that I couldn’t really read the console, I didn’t read Zetan either.

That’s why I tinkered with the Pip-Boy. It was a Fallout protag’s main tool, and running on video game logic hasn’t failed me too badly yet, so I figured this oversized smartwatch would help with the console.

Running through the UI, I found a few useful features like biotelemetry, functions for putting in notes and reminders, and of course, the radio. Looking through the console the Pip-Boy as a whole was highlighted in a brighter green than usual. I mentally clicked the outline and- FAAAHCK!

I dropped to the ground in slow motion, blinking tears as my brain felt like it was boiling up and churning. It lasted for all of eight seconds before the pain subsided and my head didn’t feel like it was straining to explode anymore.

Fucking hell, what was that?

I went back to console mode, found the alien text missing. Instead, strings of familiar Latin alphabet and Arabic numbers replaced everything. My two health bars, for example, now read “uwaWZ8m0u1Zb?W Qvv” and “SRb?m0u1Zb?W Qvv”.

Great, now I had indecipherable human text instead.

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