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Civil Affairs: Retribution

WetRats

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How did you get hold of the list?

Because if it was from one of my people, I need to find out what other information they may have leaked.

No. I won’t ask you who. If you say it’s somebody who works for me, I’ll find out who.

Yes, I'll believe you.

All right then. Thank you. I’ll let Madison know that somebody on her end let it out.

I’ve gotta admit that I was stunned when I learned it was you. You never struck me as that much of a hands-on guy.

No. That was a compliment. I’m usually much better at reading people.

But you play an oddly subtle game. Christ, you were such an outspoken advocate for the Railroad, nobody suspected you of being one of their most effective legmen. Talk about hiding in plain sight. I was sure surprised to find you pointing a pistol at me in those catacombs.

Granted, at the moment, I was far more concerned by Glory and her minigun, but now I realize you were by far the most dangerous person I was facing that night.

When Marowski and A.J. went down, I thought nothing of it. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

I was sorry to hear about Lonegan, though. He was a sleazeball, but mostly harmless, and everyone knows how I feel about pre-war ghouls.

Cricket was no surprise. She was a half-step from death the whole time I knew her.

I certainly wasn’t sad about Weathers. Hell, I’ll buy you a drink and curse his memory.

Henry Cooke wasn’t one of yours, was he? I don’t see you framing that poor bastard Pembroke. Good.

It wasn’t until Lucas was killed that I realized what was happening. He wasn’t the kind of guy who made enemies. Straightforward. Tough. No bullshit.

Yeah. When he died, the whole list flashed through my mind, and I realized what was happening.

Nope. Not gonna tell you. You’ve got your secrets, and I’ve got mine.

You don’t get Carla, though. She’s off-limits.

She and I had a long, long word of prayer years ago about her side-job.

That’s why she got off the road and set up shop in Concord. So I could keep an eye on her. Make sure that I could still trust her.

She’s an old lady. She’s paid her penance. And I believed her when she told me she didn’t know who was actually buying the information.

Neither did the others, for that matter.

In trade for letting Carla live, I’ll give you a name that wasn’t on the list.

The name of the person who bought the information from all of your victims.

The name of the person who actually knew who they were working for.

All right? Good.

Stash.

Yep.

Did you really think it was her junkie bodyguard who killed her?

You should have talked to me when you got the list, Tony. I could have saved you a lot of trouble.
 
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I always felt that Tony Savoldi being Drummer Boy should have been acknowledged with at least ONE line of dialogue in the game.
 
Out Of Time

By Piper Wright Coolwater
Editor Emeritus


I imagine you’ve already read the obituary on page one.

The staff did a very good job. It was fair and thorough.

This will be neither.

*******

He died mid-sentence, can you believe that?

He was in full-blown lecture mode, conjuring the university professor he had expected to be.

I wasn’t looking at him. I’d heard it all before, but many of you know how he was once he got rolling.

Then he stopped talking.

Jonas Coolwater stopped talking.

I looked up from my reading when I heard him hit the floor.

Curie says it was a cerebral hemorrhage. His brain stopped. Just… stopped.

No more Big Ideas.

No more Plans.

No more clever comments that only he understood or appreciated.

At least the last thing he heard was the sound of his own voice.

*******

A lot of folks will say that he was the best thing that ever happened to The Commonwealth.

He would have told you that The Commonwealth was the best thing that ever happened to him.

The Jonas Coolwater that went into Vault 111 all those years ago was not a good man.

All he had wanted was to become an academic like his father had been, surrounded by peers who would challenge him intellectually and by students who would be awed and inspired by his brilliance.

He was a sociologist. What people did, how they did it, how they worked together and how they didn’t—-these were the things that fascinated him.

But the Army had other plans for him.

They needed someone who could help them pacify conquered territories. Someone who could manage and manipulate. Someone who could turn all the theory he had studied into hard, practical reality.

And he was good at that. (Of course he was. What wasn’t he good at?)

But he hated it. He wanted to make the world a better place, but instead he found himself serving the policies of a thoroughly corrupt government.

And then Alaska happened.

Suddenly, he wasn’t just dressing like a soldier, he was one.

But not a proper soldier, with rules and regulations and a proper chain of command.

He had to become a guerrilla. A partisan. A terrorist.

And he was good at that, too. (Of course he was.)

He discovered a real gift for killing. Not just killing with his own hands, but managing and manipulating others to kill for him.

And planning.

Everyone reading this knows what a planner Jonas was.

When his commanding officer’s own incompetent plans got more of his own people killed than the enemies, Jonas did the only thing that made sense—-he killed the general, and became The Man With The Plan.

And his plans worked. (Of course they did.)

But in his mind he had crossed the line from soldier to murderer.

This idealistic intellectual had become what he believed to be a monster.

If Parsons had been a genuine hospital, rather than a prison and feeding ground for a genuine monster, perhaps Jonas could have gotten the help he needed. But instead, he was tortured, both physically and mentally. He never did tell me the details, but I was there when he dreamed. I suppose it’s a testament to the strength of his will that he was able to recover as well as he did. But the experience only hardened him further, and made him feel even more detached from society.

The would-be sociologist had become utterly asocial.

*******

Then the bombs dropped, and the one person to survive Vault 111 was a truly dangerous man with nothing to believe in.

Or so he thought.

Out here, he found something broken, but realized he might just be able to fix it.

The Commonwealth became his sociology lab.

He couldn’t have done what he did without becoming what Alaska made him. What he chose to become to survive Alaska, he’d have told you––nobody made him do what he did.

But Jonas the killer, Jonas the murderer, was able to rediscover Jonas the idealist, Jonas the teacher.

He found the intellectual challenges he had sought.

He found the awed and inspired students he craved.

He found a way to respect himself again.

And he learned how to love. Not just me, but all of you. Well most of you, anyway.

He was so proud of what we accomplished, what his students accomplished.

He was so relieved to be able to hand over his responsibilities. So proud of the strong, vibrant legislature you elected. So grateful to all of you who believed in his Big Plans and made them work.

And he would have been officially embarrassed and privately amused by the elaborate funeral you folks are planning.

Go for it, Commonwealth. It’s your party now. Keep making him proud.
 
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