Level 25 (2 Perk points floating)
S-3 Armorer 1,
P-(+)10 Rifleman 2, Awareness, Locksmith 3
E-2
C-6 Lady Killer 1, Local Leader 2
I-6 Gun Nut 1, Hacker 3, Science 1
A-(+)6 Gunslinger 3, Action Boy 2
L-3
(Astoundingly Awesome 8, Barbarian 5, Covert Operations, Gift of Gab, Junktown Vendor 2, Massachusetts Surgery, Tesla Science, Tumblers Today, Wasteland Survival 7 and 9)

Piper seems to have made herself at home here already, as she’s downstairs when I wake up. I head down to get into my power armor before continuing to loot the place. It will be quite difficult to go back to my normal carry weight after this long trek in power armor. Upstairs is a locked steamer trunk with an incredible amount of ammo, a cryo mine, and some good guns I hand to Piper. The more heavily locked safe, by comparison, has less rare ammo and only a standard 10mm. I wonder if there is a degree of chance in loot spawning, rather than set loot, for these containers.

Seeing the settlement in the daylight, it looks like a nice enough place, but certainly not big enough to support many settlers. I’ll probably keep it as a storage/crafting outpost. Before I forget, I decide to pursue the chem stash in the drainage at the end of the canal that was the downfall of the people that were here before (and just to make sure none of them are still alive and in need of help).

When I realize there’s an area transition involved, I know this may take more time than I think to investigate, but I’m committed. There are a lot of blood bugs in here, but fortunately as they’re looking for me after I snipe some they set off some kind of explosion, which takes care of some of the work for me. Looking around, there are some archways and chambers in here I can’t quite reach by jumping, but I may find another way around. Well, I COULD reach them by jumping if my character were capable of catching himself on a ledge and hauling himself up. Bethesda’s large open world games don’t exactly need Assassin’s Creed style acrobatics and climbing (though that would be cool), but they could add a ledge grab for the sake of realism. We have these insanely skilled characters that can’t even climb a wall they can peek their heads over.

The most interesting thing in the chamber is some kind of terminal and a cage-like structure on one wall, so I head that direction. I hack the terminal, but soon find these are not the chems I’m looking for. Some good ammo and other loot though. I finally realize to get to the other part of the area I have to walk across some pipes and jump from there. Here lies Russell, who got pretty close to his goal before dying. No sign of the girl though.

The chems are decent. The nearby fusion core for my power armor is much more exciting. Russell has a tape on him that’s labeled Pledge Initiation Instructions, which I at first find incredibly odd as I haven’t seen any fraternities throwing toga parties in the wastes. Then I realize this is probably the old holotape he found. It’s basically talking about some initiation involving drugs. This old drainage pipe was apparently the place where they mixed the drugs for the initiation and conducted the ceremony. I step out of my power armor to mix my own superdrugs at the chemistry station, then head out, still wondering what happened to Margie.

I don’t have to worry long. I find her body outside under a boat. I must have missed it the first time. There’s a note on the body from Russell, who I now figure out is the girl’s brother. Aside from the expected, he mentions that he told his mom he was going over to a place called the Slog to trade. I’ll have to keep an eye out for this Slog place nearby, as I can always use a good trade center.

With it only being early afternoon and a bright day, I decide to cut back to the road and follow it to County Crossing so I can get some looting in on the way. I find a campsite with some ammo, some supplies, and the remains of a cooking station (that is, aesthetically a cooking station, but with no fire and without the affordance of interacting with it to craft). It’s here I realize how close I am to Malden Center, with the medical building looming over the hill.

This park by the river is filled with the sound of insects, but as there are no enemy markers popping up on my HUD I can assume these are the normal variety. Over the hill I can see the road leads past some construction sites, which have sparse loot but plenty of crafting materials. This is the place to hit up if I ever need cement.

Past the construction, I turn to spot a random turret in the garage of a house. It doesn’t immediately do anything so I just stare at it, lured into complacency by all the deactivated turrets that still show up in VATS for whatever reason. This one soon starts winding up to fire though, so I destroy it. Odd that it took so long to register me. It wasn’t protecting anything important, so it seems really random unless it was outlying defense for the Estates down the road. Little good it did them.

Other than a dead Brotherhood Scribe and a grenade bouquet trap that the Brotherhood somehow avoided setting off, the return to West Everett Estates seems uneventful until I spam VATS and spot a supermutant in one of the houses. They come back fast! I suppose the dead Scribe should have tipped me off. I snipe him through the window in one shot. As a bonus (and likely a glitch) he seems to have respawned all the valuables in the house, including the Nuka Cola Quantum. He also has a minigun, but I can’t carry it right now.

 
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I pop down into the bunker to check it out. It’s a pretty nice place, and there’s another Quantum down here! Annoyed with being over my carry limit, I turn to alcoholism (as alcohol boosts strength, I suppose, by lessening the pain you feel straining yourself?). I can always pay for the doc to cure me when I get back to county crossing. It’s 5:14, that’s late enough to start with a bourbon I suppose. My carry weight boosted by 10 pounds, I get to looting. There’s some pretty great loot here all around.

Here I find the continuing story of the settlement from Wayne’s perspective. He was apparently a Medtech employee and by all counts an exceptional individual who managed to rescue his kids before they were sent to Vault 75 and got back to his bunker. Apparently his wife, Bonnie, was not so lucky, stuck in the hospital. The tale is an even more touching one than Lance’s of survival in the early days after the bomb. I don’t know what happened to the kids mentioned, but I can only assume the worst. The last entry lets me know about the Irish Pride Shipyard, but I’ve already spotted that and was planning to stop there.

The terminal also has a holotape called David’s Holotape in it. A recording made by the youngest son in a panic, which recounts the raiders arriving and Lance getting killed. He’s trying to leave a note for his mom so she knows where they went, but his dad is trying to get out before the raiders return. It seems like Wayne and his family might have made it out after all. I like to think so, anyway.

The sun is setting by the time we get out of the Estates. As I approach the Irish Pride Shipyard I spot an airship hovering in the distance. Perhaps the Brotherhood of Steel’s HQ is nearby. I take another swig of bourbon to re-up my strength and start heading towards the shipyard when I spot a scavenger walking by.

He’s red in VATS, but only level 2, and he doesn’t seem to be acting aggressively (or doesn’t see me). He looks up at me and tells me to just move along. I’ve never had enemies marked as aggressive stop to talk to me before, so I make no move towards him to see what he does. Another one joins him, and she tells me to keep moving, and he echoes, “you don’t belong here!” I hardly see how they’re in a position to issue demands to me. It’s too bad the intimidation perk requires 10 Charisma or I’d buy it and use it. Instead, I decide not to be the aggressor, and I leave the shipyard til tomorrow.

I could kill all these people easily, even as a third scavenger joins them, but I would feel bad about it. They’re just trying to make a living and have as much reason as I do to trust anyone they find wandering out here (which is to say, not much reason at all). I reflect on how the game presents its power fantasy to me. With my growing skills and mastery of the environment, now far surpassing most humans I come in contact with at least, I’m made to feel as though I have a right to the looting and exploration of the wasteland. I can be secure in my moral superiority only because I have the power to survive without having to make morally dubious decisions. The scavengers and raiders of the wastes might not have that same privilege. This moment where an enemy spoke to me instead of shooting at me was enough to get me to stop and think about that (although not this moment alone, as a reader of this blog will see it’s crossed my mind from time to time and those previous moments surely impact this one). I’m not saying I won’t go back to shooting raiders. Most of them are pretty bad people and shoot at me on sight and I can’t exactly let that stand, but I might try to avoid aggression with scavengers in the future.

As the last light of the sun fades on the horizon, I reach the outskirts of County Crossing and stop briefly to explore the ruined structures near a pipeline of some sort. I don’t get much but increasing radiation poisoning for my troubles, but fortunately there’s some radaway in a nearby crate. I find the settlers still working the nearby field. They thank me and join up with the Minutemen. I drop some supply materials at the workshop and consider the settlement. It covers a fair amount of ground and has some potential, but isn’t naturally all that defensible and I would have to do most of the building from the ground up. It does have a lot of space for crop growing though. For now I just shore up the defenses and resolve to send a supply line this way when I get back to Sanctuary.

Doc Weathers was apparently just a traveling doctor, as he doesn’t seem to be here anymore. Fortunately, my bourbon escapades of the day weren’t enough to get me addicted, so I don’t really need him. I could have used him to sell stuff, but after storing all my crafting material here that’s no longer as necessary.

It’s time to turn in for the night so I decide to try and repair the one ruined house in the area, just give it some walls again and a rudimentary roof. This, it turns out, is of course far more difficult than it should be. The house cannot be completely scrapped to start over on the foundation, like some of the houses in Sanctuary, but trying to rebuild with the options available is a hot mess. I end up with something that looks ok from certain angles, but largely defies physics. There aren’t even craftable columns of various heights, perhaps the easiest thing they could have thrown in to explain how structures are supported. My back wall is supported on a couple of side tables. Of course, it doesn’t need to be AT ALL. I could have just left the wall inexplicably floating in the air. A far simpler option, since there seem to be only a few house templates in the game, would be a button you can click to repair a structure. Or make all these ruined structures scrapable.