Chapter 132: Chapter 128

Nat grimaced as she watched her friends undergo the appraisal rite to determine one’s position in the eldritch scale of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. According to Piper, the process could only take into consideration past deeds, not whatever dark fantasies one might have. So being on the lighter side of gray meant that you hadn’t done anything too bad yet despite whatever foul thoughts ran through your head all the time.

 

A flawed process, obviously, but for the purposes of emergency ritual uses, deeds and their intent was all that mattered.

 

Josh closed his eyes as the snaking trails of incense whirled around him and the occultist chanted a stream of tongue-twisting sounds. The ritual ended rather anticlimactically, with the incense smoke coalescing into the square piece of paper in Josh’s hands. Then came a loud puff, and it was over.

 

“Raise your paper, please,” the bespectacled occultist in the lab coat said, and the boy lifted up the square slip, the trails of smoke falling away from it. It had been tinted into a light gray, grade B2, if Nat matched the tone right with the chart from her memories. There was also a single line of blue on the paper, a side effect of the ritual that no one had figured out yet.

 

“B2, blue.” The occultist took the paper from her friend with an appreciative nod before shooing Josh off to reset the ritual for the next student. 

 

Nat herself was an A3, purple. Slightly better in deeds than Josh, probably because he had been sneaking into 1st Company’s training grounds to get some shooting done with his sister. That the shooting exercises sometimes involved captured raiders…

 

Eh, who was she to judge? Nat herself had been killing those scum for a while, and she was still an A3. Maybe it’s because Benji’s been doing other stuff?

 

It was an open secret that Sev’s appraisal result was a dark gray, but as quickly as that fact spread, so too did the obvious reasoning that it was because he clearly sacrificed a lot for the Nexus. Being with him from the start, Nat believed it.

 

She’d realized just how sheltered she and her sister had been thanks to Sev’s taking care of them. He’d slaughtered raiders, and aliens for them, gave them the weapons and training to defend themselves, and asked for nothing in return. And then he’d done the same to those who needed his protection. The vague horrors in Tleilax was a means to continue Sev’s desire to protect everyone.

 

If Sev being an E3 made him evil, then the whole Nexus should be to blame for it, the Wright sisters included.

 

Piper fucking him was purely her own initiative, Nat understood. With the benefit of hindsight and eavesdropping, she only recently understood why Sev had been so awkward that time in the Tupile. The younger Wright also knew about the accidental deaths in the cordoned off cryo section in the space station, and that Sev’s still holding some guilt over his recklessness. 

 

Looking back to their adventures, it was clear now to Nat that the Nexus’ creation and growth was a carefully guided thing by Sev. Whether knowingly or not, he was trying to avoid repeating the accident in the Tupile again. The overly cautious approach he took could easily seem like he was playing with his food when it came to facing down threats like the old Institute and the Brotherhood of Steel.

 

But at least it didn’t hold him down so much that he hesitated when things like Far Harbor came up. The monsters deserved every bit of cruelty inflicted to them for what they did to their victims. Nat had used the authorization Sev had granted her, against her own better judgment, to take a peek at the recordings of what was found in the so-called ‘breeding den’, and read through the reports from the occultist department.

 

It made her even more grateful that she and Piper had Sev looking out for them all this while.

 

Returning to the present, Nat saw Kari exiting the ritual circle. An A2? That puts her in the…ninth percentile or something? A shame her blood wasn’t O negative or the girl would be getting all the perks in a few years time just so the occultists could get her blood.

 

*****

 

“The museum’s a bust,” Nick Valentine reported with a sigh and handed over a file with his paperwork. Head Administrator Gwen McNamara received it with a nod, not showing any signs of disappointment.

 

“It’s about to be expected, I suppose,” the woman said. 

 

The detective shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t be too lucky all the time, even if it is called the Museum of Witchcraft.”

 

Contract work from the Nexus was proving a highly interesting and profitable deal, even if it mostly involved digging through quarantined ruins. After the discovery of metaphysical sciences, the Museum of Witchcraft was marked as one such site to be investigated. And as there weren’t enough staff to go around, Nick took the offer to take a look. Considering the lack of rumors about the place, not even a tall tale, he had expected to find nothing of note, and he was right.

 

Well, it definitely was a good change compared to delving into a submerged quarry. The bots had cleared out the water in no time, but Nick was still the one to scout the place. He relied on the rune-etched scanners the Nexus provided him to pick up a few interesting sites and trinkets that he marked and recorded for the specialists to handle.

 

Apparently, Nick was unique in the sense that he somehow had a metaphysical ‘soul’ and all the lovely perks that came with it (not that anyone actually knew the exact details). The labcoats in Ix are still figuring out how he got it. The last the detective heard, the most likely explanation was when his decades of simulated personality converted into an actual sentience, a soul came with it. He still didn’t know if he should like that speculation.

 

But at the same time, being a second-gen synth, Nick was clearly not human, and thus was also immune to a lot of metaphysical effects that might mess around with a human mind. He remembered the head researcher of all this voodoo magic was just about ready to tear her hair out when she went through the results. 

 

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Being immune to stuff like the Faceless infection and a few other interesting spells made Nick a very well paid investigator for the Nexus. Without a fleshy brain to compromise, he was the perfect candidate to look at scrawls and scratchings on walls and floors, or read through old texts that were potential infohazards. And he didn’t need a full team to constantly check on his state of mind.

 

The work was definitely more interesting than chasing after lost kittens or looking into cheating spouses, that’s for sure. And the more he got involved, the more he learned about the metaphysical world, and boy was Nick glad he was immune to a lot of the stuff. Sure, it also meant he couldn’t directly cast rituals, but that was a good trade off for not ending up like the lunatics that were once the Children of Atom.

 

It also meant he got more jobs, and thus got to relocate his apartment to a cushy new skyscraper overlooking Diamond Stadium. Heck, he was able to afford the whole floor thanks to the pay he was making.

 

Speaking of… “Anything new to look into?”

 

The administrator smirked faintly as she pulled out a few files and laid them on the desk before him. “Got a few frontier sites that could use a look. Mostly caves and dens.”

 

Crap. He hated the natural outdoors. It was hard for his synth processing to guess the state of caves left alone for who knows how long, or worse, dug by the local wildlife. And Nick was definitely not traumatized from that one time he almost got buried under a cave-in.

 

“Any good ruins?” he checked hopefully as he sifted through the files.

 

*****

 

“Don’t worry, Danny is not in trouble,” Minuteman Carl Locke reassured Emma. “It was a simple misunderstanding, and his heart was in the right place after all. Nobody is interested in pressing charges.”

 

Emma groaned and fought back a furious blush while her son sat beside her with the deepest of regret on his downcast face. “Thank you, thank you. I’m so sorry…”

 

Getting a surprise visit from a Sentinel urgently requesting her presence in the nearby Nexus Enforcer station was a fright that the single parent didn’t want to feel again. She almost broke down when the robot mentioned it was related to Danny, and when she found her son safe and sound, the relief quickly gave way to a fear that he’d done something bad. 

 

After getting the details, Emma happily settled for embarrassment over fear.

 

The Minuteman who sat across her in the dining room kept a soft smile on his features as he downplayed the incident. “If anything, I hear they might use that take for a different program,” he offered with a chuckle.

 

Danny’s head shot up in panic, while Emma gave the Nexus enforcer an inquisitive look. “It was a…” Carl made a show of looking down at his Pip-Boy. ”...’rash act of compassion’, as the director put it, highlighting Danny’s courage despite the nature of the scene.”

 

Emma couldn’t help but feel fierce pride at the compliment aimed at her Danny. The boy still looked utterly terrified though, and gave her a pleading look, before turning it to the man across him who gave Danny a wink. “You should be proud, kid, your friends might get to see you on screen.”

 

“Please, no…” Danny whimpered meekly as he slumped in his seat, likely imagining the teasing he’d be getting from his schoolmates should this become public knowledge.

 

Emma shared a look with Minuteman Locke, and then she gave her fidgeting son a smirk. ”That’s wonderful! Do you want to tell Carrie about it, or should I?”

 

“Mooom!”

 

For better or worse, Danny did not get to appear on television, though the director was nice enough to send over a copy of the scene he ruined. Carrie had gotten her hands on it before her brother, so the family got to watch a rather well acted clip of a young woman in a small, well-lit room struggling free from three men in robes. That her dress was slowly slipping off her lithe body as she flailed and kicked was definitely intentional, and Emma found the men’s supposedly dark promise to ‘sacrifice her virginity’ to be far more laughable than believable.

 

“Let her go!” And then, there was a high-pitched cry, and the camera panned jerkily to a trembling boy who was pointing at the frozen group. “I’ll call the bots! Let her go!”

 

“Okay, cut!” Despite that the cameras still picked up the director appearing from behind the camera, in the same robes as the other three, walking slowly towards an antsy Danny. “Hey, son, you’re not supposed to be here. Come on, let’s g- Oof!”

 

He keeled over as the obscured boy lashed out with a shriek. The three robed actors and the almost undressed actress rushed over to pull Danny off and see to their fallen director. Emma and Carrie couldn’t hold back their laughter when the actress calmed Danny down, and the poor boy realized what he had stumbled upon when he finally turned to stare at the camera. The clip ended there, freezing Danny’s horrified face on screen as Carrie laughed her lungs out and Emma turned to her son who was burying his flushed face in his hands.

 

“So what have we learned Daniel?”

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