As it turns out the combined might of a teenager and thirteen-year old count for very little when working on raising up a several ton mutated monstrosity, but Lari and Catha liked to think they helped a smidge at sliding the body off the Traveller enough so that he could squeeze himself out from under it. In truth their efforts were in vain, the Traveller wiggled free of his own accord.
"You-" The Traveller tried to sweep off the splattering of blood and shredded intestine all over his jacket, only to find them much sticker than he anticipated. "-must be the Chief's daughter. Catha, if I recall?"
"Uh... yeah. It's still me. Pleased to meet you- again." Catha pouted to herself as the silly adult shrugged and got back to the important business of scrapping mutant innards off his clothes. "I just saved Lari, you know!"
"Did you really? And how did you go about doing a thing like that?" The Traveller embellished his speech and emotions in that manner that most adults do unconsciously when talking to little people. Catha noticed, but found the play to be nostalgic. No one really spoke to her with any of that manufactured whimsy these days.
"Well, it was that mutant right there! I was hiding right over there when you guys started attacking, and I saw that skinny monster bearing down on Lari with it's big gun. But I also saw what you did with that other monster, I was watching the whole time, see, so while everyone was distracted I snatched up your knife out of the big one, and then I ran up to the skinny one, I climbed up it's back and jabbed the... bevel! It's a 'bevel', right? I jabbed this right in the back of it's head really hard. It was actually pretty easy. Lari will tell you- oh Lari, you don't look so good..."
The boy was trying, and failing, to put on a brave face as he clutched the bleeding shrapnel wounds in his shoulder. Somehow he was already starting to feel clammy and light-headed, like when he would bear the entire food wagon by himself under the beating desert sun. The world was gently fading and revolving in his head, the Traveller had to literally catch the boy before he did himself another mischief.
With a practised expertise, the Traveller hurried to aid the boy as well as one can without a first aid kit to hand. Catha could but watch and try not to grimace too much as the man ripped off Lari's shirt sleeve, dapped a quick swig of drinking water on each of his finger tips and took to the precision work of pulling each shrapnel piece from inside Lari's shoulder with his bare hands.
"Try not to squirm." He warned, as his fingers dug inside the boy's arm, grappling inside the flesh and muscle. Somehow the delirium of it only brushed at the edge of Lari's consciousness, and rather than pain all the boy really registered was the absurd peculiarity of something living and wriggling pressing under his skin.
"It that the lot?" The Traveller examined the small collection of rock particulate and bullet fragment he had pulled out of the boy, then he twisted his Pip-boy's screen so that the back-light glowed into the dozens of tiny gashes and gouges up the boy's bleeding arm. When no metal caught his light, he nodded, flicked the dozens of shrapnel out to the floor and simply said. "Sorry, 'bout this next part."
Both the kid's heads spun to him with questioning frowns, both soon answered as the man whipped out a flash of whiskey from his duffel bag, dabbed the boy's shirt rippings with it, and then slapped that make-shift rag on the fresh wound.
Like burning lava poured into one's mouth, the heat of expectation radiated out of the afflicted area before the waves of wracking agony descended. But when the stinging sensations did start washing over him, those prickling needles of fire all but bowled Lari over again. The Traveller had to physically hold the boy as still as he could whilst Lari frothed and convulsed, all under Catha's bewildered and frightened vigil. Only once the initial shock began to fade into the background throbbing of his generally aching body could the boy appreciate the warmth of the alcohol dampened cloth as it cleaned his wounds.
"You're lucky." The Traveller told Lari once the boy had calmed down enough that he could be sure he was not about to catch a backhand for saying it. "The bullet grazed right past you; well, as much as a 308. can graze. It took a tiny chunk out of your arm, there's no hiding that; but most of the shot didn't get lodged in you. Or worse, rip through anything important. Is this your first time getting shot?"
The boy nodded feverishly, blinking welling tears of out of his ducts enough so that he could see the kindly Traveller's face and appreciate his curt bed-side manner.
"Well, this is about the best way you could have had it. During the war there were kids about the same age as you getting carried in on stretchers with bullets riddled up in their guts. Or shrapnel sticking out of their eyes." He kissed teeth and shook his head. "A rough way to wake up to the world."
"The war?" Catha asked in a small voice. "Do you mean... the great war? The great fire?"
"What? No, of course not. That was over two hundred years ago- how old do you think I am?"
Catha grinned. "At least a hundred."
"Oh, is that right? Let me tell you something, girl; you may lack a decent frame of reference, what with the company you keep, but I ain't that- ow." The Traveller felt the rust rock his knees as he tried to sit back on them. "Okay, maybe this body is more than a bit battered, but I'm still young where it matters. In the heart. Anyway enough ribbing me, Princess. What about you? You've got a good alibi on you or are we just to guess at why you were playing tag with a bunch of Super Mutants?"
The girl's toothy grin vanished behind a grimace. "I... um... I was scouting."
"Scouting?" The Traveller echoed.
"Catha!" Lari groaned as The Traveller rolled a fresh white fabric bandage tight enough around his arm to reignite the wound. "The Pathfinder is meant to scout! You're needed at home, with the tribes!"
"Why?" Catha shot back with a tempestuous indignancy. "So I can sit through another tongue lashing from my grandfather about what a poor student I make? That's what I do back there, you know. Whilst you two are out having your adventure, Pinac has me sit down going over and over all the old lessons: management , delegation, arbitration- you know how bad I am at all of that stuff! The words just melt out of my ears, Lari, I forget everything, everytime!
Did you know my Uncle used to make fun of me for it? He used to say 'That's just your brain blindness, every kid has that. Some day you'll think about all these simple lessons and laugh that they ever gave you trouble!'. Can you believe that? 'Wonderkid' Uncle Ketel actually said that to me! Well guess what, it's been five years now and I'm still not laughing! I am the Chief-in-waiting, Lari, I can't be wasting my time failing basic lessons- I need to be out there, with you! I need to learn the wastes by being out here. What am I going to learn about being Chief sitting in that cave getting shouted out by the Seer?"
The Traveller twisted the ends of a cloth around Lari's arm, folding it into a neat knotted bandage. "With all due respect, your chiefness, you won't learn nothing dissolving in some Super Mutant's stomach either. How did the brutes corner you anyway?"
The girl scratched her chin. "I wanted to find the next cave large enough for all the tribes to camp in. And I found the spot, but... it was already occupied." Catha awkwardly tugged at her pony braid. "I was scouting really early before anyone work up, and I found these big totem skulls lodged into the rocks." The Traveller nodded along grimly. "When I followed the totems and the fires they ended up leading to this just huge cave, which is the spot I mentioned, much bigger than this one... and a whole bunch of the gross green demons-"
"Super mutants."
"-Super demons, all screeching at each other and fighting and making these weird noises. They were like a den of squabbling molerats. Until the bigger one came and shut them all down."
"Bigger one? You mean, bigger than all these lot?"
Catha nodded. "Mmhmm. He looked meaner too. Not as green. With these big white eyes that he squeezed into little walnuts like..." She scrunched up her face until her nostrils flared wide. "...Like this." The Traveller nodded blankly, enthralled by a description he could not immediately identify. "Then they all started saying the same thing together. Like one of the White Doves' chants. They said 'Doors' 'Doors' 'Doors', and then the big one spoke to them. He spoke pretty good as well, not like these others. And he said... what did he say..."
"Death to the humans!"
High above them and perched above the plunge, glaring down at that with hate-dripping malice, was a Super Mutant quite unlike any other the Traveller had witnessed before. It's skin had a sickly yellowish hue with large red sore-like splotches over the ribs were the musculature had swelled from mutation so much as to be pushing against his chest, threating to break free. It's yellow-green face was stretched so gauntly against that disfigured skull that it looked to be scowling and grinning at the same time. And it's pupils were pure white, just as Catha had described. As if the size of the thing was not itself enough, it was also carrying a heavy Gatling laser with a giant mounted energy backpack and cumbersome rotating-barrel canon strapped to his hand.
The Traveller leapt up to his feet, but held back from drawing just yet. Most Mutants had it drilled into their brain to enter all situations with an unhealthy amount of violence, as unpleasant as he was largely presenting himself, the Mutant was talking first. That alone was worth exploring. Besides, he had the kid's wellbeing to consider, valour had to take the back seat. "Well howdy up there, big fella. I think we were just chatting about you, but I guess you must have known that. Were your ears burning? Say, seeing as how we have you here in person and all, how about we get to having a dialogue before blasting each other in mush?" It's green-knuckle grip tightened. "Wouldn't that be the civilised thing to do?"
The offer hung whilst the Mutant's retinue, hallways full of slightly less engorged Super Mutant grunts, fidgeted and groaned impatiently. The Traveller bade the children to get behind him with a subtle wave of his hand, and the two tried their best slide behind him as gradually as possible without drawing attention or ire.
Silent deliberations drew on as the giant Mutant squinted it's bulging white eyes into beady pinpricks at the humans. That prototypical Mutant hatred seared from his gaze, but some intrinsic, mature, reasoning seemed to wrestle within them too.
"Me Dawes." It finally introduced itself, in a voice gravelled enough to pave a driveway. "You are intruders. Give us the kitty and maybe we let you live."
"Okay well, first off; 'maybe' isn't exactly solid odds where I come from, so I'm going to have to haggle with you a bit there. And secondly, this 'Kitty' you're talking about- her name is 'Catha' actually, but I understand the mix up- she's with us."
"He wants to take me back to the man in white!" Catha hissed from behind the Traveller.
"The what?" Lari muttered back.
"When the demons caught me spying on their leader they took me to this man in white. At least I think he was a man. He looked like- really ugly. Still he was the most normal person I saw in their whole camp, but he spoke with honey-laced poison. I couldn't trust him so I ran away."
The Super Mutant, an Overlord by his own kind's designation, conferred with his grunts as loudly as Super Mutants usually are. (Most lacked any actual control over their own volume levels.) During which the group heard frequent references to the 'Pencil man'. When Dawes returned, he did so with his grimacing menace.
"We not meant to kill. Make Pencil Man angry when we do. You can have Kitty back when Pencil man done; but we NEED kitty!" He aggressively thumbed the red trigger at the grip of his Gatling laser, causing the quad-barrels to spin. "You give Kitty. Or we Take Kitty."
Lari gripped his hunting rifle by the barrel, fighting the tremble in his hand at the prospect of another battle. But as Catha was gripping onto his lower back, shaking like a leaf, he did as best to smother his terror for her sake.
His injured arm was useless with its wound, but perhaps if he laid the barrel on a rock he could just about manage to reload and fire with a single arm. If pack hunting at taught him anything, it was that killing the big one tends to scatter the rest of them. Then again, loud footsteps are enough to scatter your typical Radstag; 'transitive property' can lead to a misleading formula.
"Hold up!" As if reading the mind of Lari as he prepared to make his last suicidal stand against an army that would surely rip him to shreds; the Traveller held up his hand and fixed both the boy and the Mutant Overlord with a steely glare. "We can meet a compromise."
The mutant's nostrils seemed to flare, as if those tortured skin flaps could stretch any wider. "Compr- computer- com-"
"A deal. We can make a deal. Take me to have a chat with this 'Pencil man' directly. Face to face, and I'll see if I can't work this whole thing out."
The Mutant bared it's teeth, a little more than they always were as the bones constantly gnashed between his paired-back lips. Clearly the art of negotiation was far from his personal array of carefully honed murder talents, as his rad-warped mind was honed to settle on violent terms most every day. Just as every Mutant was. But The Traveller recognised a glimmer behind the primal savage body that the Super Mutant race was entrapped within, some vague semblance of cilvilised standard that this single Mutant seemed to hold itself too. That was the reason it spoke before shooting (or whilst shooting, as it's brethren typically prefer) whether of his own accord or by the whims of this 'Pencil man'; the Overlord had a walnut of a mind in his brain cage, and seemed receptive to nursing it.
"The small human stay here." Dawes growled.
The Traveller nodded ."Gotcha."
"Kitty doesn't move!"
"Deal."
"Wait!" Catha grabbed the hem of The Traveller's jacket and pulled tightly. "You're not going to just leave us here, are you?"
The Traveller smiled. "Princess, I came all the way down here to find you, didn't I? I'm not going to run off now. Not because of a few smelly mutants." He held up his hand and whispered that last part. A conspiratorial action that somewhat enraged his Mutant contact after all his painful attempts to appear civil.
"Human go NOW to meet Pencil man or Human no go at all!"
"Keep her safe, Lari; I'm counting on you." The Traveller departed the two children to wait in that dead end cave splattered with mutant blood and beginning to suffer the stink of pre-mouldy corpses. Everything had progressed so suddenly that Lari did not even realise until his guide had disappeared beyond the lip of the outcrop with the giant yellowish mutant at his back, that the man had essentially just offered the two of them up as hostages.
None of the Mutants spoke to The Traveller as they escorted him at rifle-point through the winding caves to their 'Pencil man', but they did speak to bicker with each other about which way the 'Pencil man' even was. Turns out horrific mutations do not, in fact, do wonders for one's sense of direction. Along the way the Traveller counted and made note of each of the human remains effigies he found erected across the cave tunnels, marking the Mutant territory, and paid particular attention to the fact that yet again, none of them contained a lick of flesh on them.
Each were picked unnaturally clean.
He was starting to form a theory, one that these Super Mutants had not captured, butchered and eaten a human for months; maybe even years for how long it takes meat to fully rot off and leave bleach white bone behind. Particularly down in a moistured environment like the deep caves. Yet the Mutants did not seem like the ravenous, hunger fuelled husks that a sensible guess might expect a starving people to be. Which in turn could mean that their slimmed down human diet likely was not just some consequence of circumstance, but some sort of conscious decision made either by them or, more likely, for them by an influential figure. Perhaps a figure like the big yellow Mutant who stalked behind the group revving his rotating laser Gatling gun barrels whenever the Traveller dared to steal a glance his direction. His mind bristled with questions about what substitutes they had found, how so many mutants could be fed so deep underground, what sort of accord had the mutants reached to challenge their base instincts. All questions that would have to be filed behind the immediate; who was this 'Pencil Man' they all seemed so deferential towards?
It was such a burning enigma in fact, that the Traveller could not help but feel a tad disappointed by the time he was lightly shoved into the subterranean laboratory of a very confused looking Ghoul in a lab coat. Like a corpse dug right up out of the ground, the Ghoul was a human once now totally moisture-less and animated solely by the power of the radiation soaring through his metabolic structure. Most who saw Ghouls for the first time ended up reacting strongly, and badly, to the sight their rotted and flaking skin, their skeletal faces and bodies and the withered form that belied the human they once were. Yes, perhaps the tragedy of the man trapped inside an unaging, yet readily decaying, body was their most haunting feature. Of course, this was nowhere near the first Ghoul that the Traveller had seen.
"Another visitor? Two in a single day? How utterly bizarre- and marvellous of course- but irreconcilably bizarre" The Ghoul frowned with a scientist's scrutiny. "Excuse me, dear visitor: you wouldn't happen to be a hallucination, would you?"
Oh brother. "Excuse me?"
"It's just there was this girl from before. I was sure she was real from the pleasant conversation we had. Well, I had, she more listened. I suppose that should have been a warning sign. I turned around to show her one of my exhibits and she just vanished while my back was turned. Poof, gone to the wind! My boys, bless their hearts, have been searching around for her all morning but they-" He lowered his voice as much as his tattered vocal cords would allow. "I think they're just indulging me. When you get to truck along for as long as I have, it comes as a given that some of your marbles get left along the way."
The Ghoul flashed a near fully-black smile and bobbled over to a desk filthy with beakers and alembics, all frothing and steaming in unison to some Rube Goldberg style procession of connected lab instruments. Vials bubbled and congealed over burners haphazardly jury rigged to egg timers. Some equipment stamps declared their ownership to some pre-war highschools, others were more specialist tools ripped out of the walls of actual pharmaceutical companies, with some of the old tiles still hanging off the wall rebar. Most notable of which was a huge haemodialysis machine the size of a bookcase, hooked to several noisily huffing portable generators that, even with their efforts combined, was still only managing to power a flickering readout screen on the machine.
"Oh, I'm real. Very much so. And I think that girl you were talking about might have been real too. If she's who I think. She's a friend, in fact. Or- more a 'friend of a friend', really."
The Ghoul squinted hard as though expecting the Traveller to fade away under closer scrutiny, then yelped excitedly when the man proved to be of flesh. "Another visitor? Two visitors! How lucky I am, so very lucky indeed. What brings the two of you down here, I must know! Is she your daughter?"
"No, no; nothing like that. We're just a... we're explorers." The Traveller studied the Ghoul's play of disinterest as he went about his lab work, probing for authenticity. "We were down here poking around these cave systems you've got, when my little friend bumped into some of your big ones. Funny lot them. You don't see many Super Mutants holed up so far underground."
"No, I don't imagine you would." The Ghoul said. "I suppose it must bring up bad memories for the majority of them. Months spent in dusty test tubes or shoved inside some vile isotopic bath. Give them the fresh air, I say!"
The Traveller frowned. "But not your Mutants?"
"Oh well, that is more of a necessary precaution now, isn't it?" The Ghoul caught himself in the middle peering over some bulky mechanical telescope to look up in embarrassment. "My- I haven't said what it is I'm doing here, have I?"
"Now that you mention it, I was wondering..."
"How scatter-brained! You must do better, Mauderlaine, it won't do to forget yourself. Not now!" The Ghoul shut his eyes, swallowed, and then relaxed his remaining facial muscles so he could start afresh and bushy tailed. "Hello there, young new friend. My name is Doctor Mauderlaine and those brutish fellows who led you here are my patients."
"Patients? I didn't know Super Mutants got ill."
"But of course they do! They are! Fundamentally and intrinsically." The Ghoul snapped. "That you yourself call them 'Super Mutants' indicates acknowledgement of their condition, although you don't see it as such. None of the Wastes do. All they see are aggressive, violent monsters and never once do they hesitate to put one down in an instant. Just bang, bang, bang with their guns and poof- there goes another misunderstood, mistreated soul; without so much as a burial."
"Yes, it's all very sad, Doctor." The Traveller tried not to roll his eyes too obviously. "But surely you know that the reputation that Super Mutants have... it's well earned! Most mutants delight in crushing normal folks to death and feasting on their corpses, it's in their nature. Before today I'd never met a mutant who actually engaged in a discourse with me- well, almost never; but with the sheer amount of their kind I've interacted with, those don't make great odds."
A studious delight lit in the Ghoul's eyes, he licked his rotted lips with a swollen lump he called a tongue and continued. "But is it their fault, I ask you? Is the rabies-ridden dog that bites at its owner at fault for his actions, or it is itself a victim of a terrible disease? Super Mutants are diseased! And curing them has been my life's work... well, several lives worth actually." He practically danced around his lab table with the giddy excitement of someone severely starved for connection. "And I am so close!"
The Traveller eyed over this makeshift cave lab again. Stuffed silly with largely commercial-grade chemistry kits and dusty mis-matched industry tools that someone had to go to great effort to fit together. "Really? From in here with all this at your disposal? You're going to reverse total cellular destruction and genetic rewriting? Colour me sceptical."
The scientist shook his head, empowered by the scepticism "Oh, all this is just part of the discovery process. That which changed those former men into green beasts, the 'Forced Evolutionary Virus', also succeeded in preserving their, now deformed, genetic code perfectly. Even after decades of roaming the radioactive wastes and soaking in waves of background radiation, their structure does not alter anymore than it already has. I could but dream for such an immunity. Goodness, the Mutant's may be less genetically changed over the past hundred years than you humans are! Imagine that..." His focus drifted with his easily arrestable mind. He had to shake himself once again to remember his present and invested guest. "Umm, anyway. With all of these... honestly rather pitiable instruments, I've been able to map the exact areas in which the FEV altered the genome, at which point reformatting the damage should merely take..." He drummed his fingers as calculations ran through his head. "... let's say, a nuclear powered reatomising chamber; with a gene sequencer attached and probably a bath in some specially synthesised combiner fluid would be appreciated. But my patients can source all of that for me; they've proven quite helpful in the past! Well... helpful when given exact instructions and written directions."
"And you really think you can operate all that equipment in the way you think you can?" The Traveller asked. "These are some pretty advanced pre-war tools you're fanaticising over; the kind even the best scientific minds before the bombs dropped would have to study for decades in order to operate."
"Oh, I know all that, boy. I helped install the things myself back when I worked for West-Tek."
Down in the spacious recess at the bottom of the plunge, filthy with the pooled blood of mutants and splats of still-sizzling chlorophyll, Catha tended to Lari's arm wound whilst keeping her aft eye affixed to the ugly Mutant guard that Dawes had left to vigil, posted right by the only way out of their little cave. It was ceaselessly staring, dead eyed with chattering teeth, through the girl with burning intensity. It's grinding jaws crunched and rolled on imaginary meat, so fully that it made her stomach shrivel just to spy on.
"What were you thinking?" Lari croaked. "Slipping off in the middle of the night- on your own! What was all of this for if you're going to happily get yourself crushed into paste by some mutant man? How are we supposed to protect our 'Chieftain' if she won't do us the basic courtesy of waiting for the 'all clear' first?"
Catha growled in kind. "Maybe I was thinking that a Chief who never leads from the front of her tribes has all the makings for a lousy leader."
"You won't lead much of anyone when your dead! Dammit, Catha, we don't have have the time for you to run off and 'discover' yourself! I'm trying to keep us all together!"
"Then when?" The girl squeezed on the ripped cloth bandage she was supposed to just be applying pressure on. "Everyone always waves me off; everyone wants me to shackle myself to my tent like a kept dog. Even you! You banned me from hunting, you won't let me scout on my own, you picked some stranger to go Pathfinding with instead of me! We were supposed to be partners!"
" 'Partners'? Lari echoed in befuddlement. "What are you talking about?"
Catha flushed red, clamping a hand over her mouth. Then her shoulders sagged and she let the frustration deflate from her until the girl crumpled like a balloon. "You forgot... I knew you would, but I just thought that if I never brought it up, if I never asked, I could pretend that you remembered."
Shadows of guilt started wrapping themselves up into a ball weighing inside of Lari' chest. But think back as hard as he could, Lari struggled to place his finger the reason why. "You're talking about... is this something from when we were kids? Or- from when I was kid?"
Catha sagged even deeper, if that was possible. "Back when Dad was... I hated spending every day learning about the horticultural properties of every plant, administrative duties, work schedules, resource invoices - it was all just noise. It never- came together, it was all just so damn frustrating! So I used to run away."
The brain clouds started to part. "Yeah- yeah, I remember that! The first time you decided to skive you came to me first, didn't you? And we came up with a plan and everything! Wasn't it something like- I would run up to your day tutor just before lunch and go babbling on about some sort of 'catastrophe'?"
"'The pigs have picked their way out their pen and gone running'!" Catha recounted.
And so did Lari. "'There's a herd of rabid carnivorous Ragstags stampeding this way'!"
"And my lessons for the day would be cancelled. Then we sneak out far away from the tents and spend the afternoon playing by the rivers, or climbing up on the tall rocks that poked up over the camps with their long shadows. Anywhere where people wouldn't find us."
"And we would play lookout!"
"Yes!" Catha smiled like a child again. "We'd take it in turns to poke our head over the rocks to see if Dad had solved your fake crisis too quickly and sent any parties out looking for us. And when they had..."
"We would scurry under the brush and hide there until they got bored and went back home!"
"Or we got bored."
Lari frowned "Hmm, as I recall it was typically you who got bored of hiding. I was more tenacious. Yeah, we were a pair of hell raisers for the Chief back then. But we had each other's backs."
"We were partners." Catha said, suddenly struck with a wave of sorrow that wet her eyes. Lari was startled that this little back and forth had bought the girl to tears, but then really thought about it. That swirling nostalgia from the days in the basin, and when her Father was still around; those would be hard memories for anyone to recall. "That was what we called ourselves! 'Partners'. And I would say 'Uncle K is headed for the rocks, Partner!' and you would say 'Don't sweat, Partner; that's a ten minute climb; we'll sneak around him!'" She made weak imitations of their younger selves between strangled sobs. "And then, when Dad caught us one day and gave me that big lecture about how I 'lacked responsibility to lead', that night I asked you if you would still be my partner, even when I was chief."
" 'Of course. We're Partners for life' ." Lari recited as the moment dawned on him.
Catha nodded, accidentally shaking salty splashes of tears that soaked into the bandage fabric and stung at Lari's wound. "But then you started changing. We stopped playing. You hung out with me less and less. I started feeling like... are you even still my friend?"
"Catha..." Lari wrapped the girl under his arm. She was still a little thing, even all these years later; and so tucked neatly under him like a baby bird in its parent's wing. "Of course I'm your friend. Even now. But we're older now, both of us have responsibilities now, serious ones; and everything's changed."
"I don't want it to change!" Catha cried. "I want to go back to the basin, I want to sneak out with you at night and spot stars from under the trees, I want to play tricks and sneak out under Pinac's nose, I want to go back home and see Dad-" She broke off into messy tears and Lari could do nothing but hold and gently rock the girl. What else could he say? What promises could he make? All he had was the ability to be the body she could cry against, and he had to hope that could somehow be enough for now.
"Let me break this down completely so that I have you one hundred percent clear. You worked at West-Tek?" The Traveller made pains to enunciate each word clearly, knowing well that the old Ghoul's hearing had somewhat deteriorated and not wanting to make any mistakes.
"I was a 'Lead Lab Technician'!" Doctor Mauderlaine said with a chest swelling pride. "At least that was what was on my badge. I actually studied as a geneticist; but management told me there were constraints on the number of licenced scientists they were legally allowed to hire. Back then the Government was peeling off excess scientists to work on military projects, you have to understand; so I had to go down on the papers as some lowly technician whilst secretly getting real work done during work hours. I don't know why that meant they had to pay me like a Lab Tech too, but I suppose I never embarked on this line of work for riches... being able to afford enough gas to drive into work would have been nice though..."
"That was over two hundred years ago! You're a pre-war Ghoul!" It was no unheard of phenomena, of course. The same gene that cursed some unlucky few to be locked in radiation resistant, but rapidly decaying, bodies that marked them as 'Ghouls', also rendered them immune to aging. Or at least they seemed to age much slowly then normal humans. A two hundred year old ghoul was by no means impossible, the Traveller even met a couple over the years himself; but they were exceeding rare. Even rarer were sane ghouls, given how all that genetic decay tended to have the unfortunate effect of turning folks feral.
" 'Ghoul', I haven't been called that for a great many moons, let me tell you!" The scientist tasted the title on his rotten tongue a few more times. "To most of the Mutants around here I'm just 'Pencil Neck' or is it just 'Pencil man' now?"
"How- how long have you been down here?"
The Ghoul scratched his mouldy chin with a nail-less finger. "You know, I don't know. I've spent so long down here mapping the Mutant Genome and only really sleeping when I feel the need to. And it's not like we can mark the passing days very well, being so far underground. Say, let me take a look at that Pip Boy."
"That what?" The Traveller stared blankly before realising that the man was referring to the miniature computer strapped to his arm, a feature that he had worn for so very long it had become like an extension of his own skin, a second nature. Most people lack the interest to mention it and the Tribespeople were apparently too polite to point out the bulky arm-device they could not recognise; it actually startled him to have someone ask to see it so bluntly. "Sure, I guess."
Doctor Mauderlaine yanked on the Traveller's arm so that he could get a closer look at the Pip-Boy, a 3000 model with knobs and switches that the scientist took great delight in pressing and turning. "Now just let me check with my earliest notes, back then I still kept track of the date..." He fumbled through scatters of documents with a surprisingly level of accurate precision, easily ordering what originally looked to be a disorganised mess by order of recency. "There we go and- oh... I missed my two hundredth and sixtieth birthday quite some months ago. Five years I've been done here. Wow; I must say considering that time frame I have made a simply stunning amount of progress! I suppose a lot can be said for working in complete isolation every waking hour of the day!"
Mauderlaine relinquished the Traveller's arm and happily hopped back to his particulars, organising and re-organising vials of equipment. The Traveller was not done poking at this smoking bombshell just yet however. "But didn't West-Tek... didn't they develop the FEV? Didn't they invent Super Mutants?"
The Ghoul nodded solemnly. "A grave overreach of their moral compunctions. If 'Morality' really did play a role in the decision at all. The desire to serve one's country, especially when that country is the United States- it's infectious, you see. And overwhelming. I'm sure in some twisted sense the horrific implications of the FEV were seen as a necessary evil to beat back the 'red menace' and 'secure our future'! But, well... you can see where that has left us." He gestured at the ramshackle set-up about him, which was still one of the most complete wasteland labs the Traveller had ever laid his eyes on. "Now their wrongs are mine to right, just as soon as I've finished my calculations."
"You sound confidant, doctor."
"Oh I am." The Ghoul winked. "Very much so. Just you wait and see."
The larger Mutant, Dawes, seemed to command a level of dominance over the Super Mutant hordes that did not extend to control over his own facilities. He would often slap at the back of his head or scream incoherent obscenities at no one in particular as the moment took him, just as most other Mutants do; but whether through some primal instinct of 'follow the bigger one' or perhaps some more innate bond between the green and deformed that transcended traditional communication, the others obeyed his orders unquestioningly. Such orders appeared to be utterly inane, at least to the Travellers' eye, pick up that crate and carry it to the storage cave so that he can order another Mutant to haul it back two minutes later, but the seemingly mindless rage-beasts dutifully marched back and forth like worker ants crawling to their instincts.
"Where did you pick up him?" The Traveller asked from the back of the congregation cave, where he and the good ghoul doctor were observing one such 'gathering of the minds'. (All the mutants were bunched up around Dawes barking in unison to his vague disjointed proclamations of 'The Age of the Super Mutant' and 'Fresh food, more food'.)
"Ah, he was a most fortuitous convert to my little project; with him he bought a contingent of his own that grew and grew as we encountered more wild mutant groups in the wastes. Not every group saw the wisdom that Dawes did, some seemed positively revolted at the concept of seeking a 'cure' for their condition, but Dawes and his men either talked them around or... He's been a great asset." The Ghoul beamed as a parent might of their overachieving child, even when that child was a slobbering monster with a Gatling laser gun strapped to his forearm. "Have you ever been to Arkansas?"
"Ar-kan-saw? No; I never even heard of the place..."
The doctor sighed. "I suppose in the 'new dark age' it's probably better known under the mislabel 'Ar-kansas'?"
"Oh, why didn't you say so? It's still a 'No' though. I've been about for sure, but never that far east. Not yet, at least." The Traveller smiled at the idea, walking the earth until the sea stopped him walking anymore. Maybe that's how you become 'worldly'.
"It's not the State it once was. That place has become a land totally overrun by armies of Super Mutants, basking in a radioactive cloud so thick it coagulates into sludge, sticks to your yellow suits and stains them brown. All humans, ghouls, anything not of their kind is stamped out and eradicated. It's a paradise for their kind."
"No kidding? And you say this is Ar-kansas? As in the whole State?"
"The whole State." The Ghoul tapped the canal where his nose once was. "But a fool's paradise is a visionaries' cage; and Dawes: he was far more brilliant then his peers. He was what is known as an 'Overlord', a king amidst mutants, revered and respected. But when he met me- well, captured, is more to the point- I saw an unwritten stanza to his play. He wanted so much more for himself, and I knew I could deliver that to him, if only he could trust me. I had the expertise, all I needed was the tools. At least, that was all I thought I needed." He looked once more at the Traveller with an expression stuck between apprehension and pleading.
"You needed Catha as a baseline." He guessed. "Manipulating the Mutant genome is one step but unless you have a model to base your work, the guided mutations would be like trying to sculpt in the dark."
"This wouldn't have been a problem two centuries ago." The Ghoul sighed. "But we lost so much after the war. The basic fundamentals of clinical science were blown into the stone ages and clawing that back to some modicum of substance has been agonising. What we need is a blood sample from a human host who's DNA hasn't been too badly twisted by the background radiation that has scarred us all. Everyone living in the Wastes world has it in them, an invisible poison tainting their structure in ways they'll never know, but by their very nature children have been exposed to less of it. A Vault-preserved child would be ideal, but I'm working with the materials at my disposal. I know that having my Mutants- acquire a young girl to be a medical asset sounds a bit...baroque-"
"That's putting it mildly."
"All I ask if for a sample of your friend's DNA. A single tincture of blood, it won't be too invasive, it won't hurt her, but the good it could do... immense." The doctor splayed his fingers apart like the expanding specks of stardust from a newly birthed star. "We could redeem a whole species."
"'Redeem' " The Traveller rolled that word on his tongue, feeling how it felt contextualised next to war-beasts and demons. "Maybe some people shouldn't be redeemed. Aren't worth it."
Doctor Mauderlaine blinked with such mad furiosity it seemed as those his eyelids might drop off from overexertion. "Come now you- you can't be serious! Surely one such as you, who's lived as you must have, made the decisions to survive that you must have... surely you can see, can't you?" The Doctor's lips stammered to a standstill as he saw not a pinch of pity reflected in the Traveller's dark eyes. Not an inch of ground given. "I- I don't know how to tell it to you... they can change. Please just- talk to Dawes. Find in him what I found, then you'll see! Please talk to him!"
The Ghoul tugged on his sleeve in desperation, begging with all the heart left in him, with that sterile innocence of the oblivious intellectual. There was nothing worthy in those creatures that the Doctor felt so indebted to fixing, but there was a curious difference about Dawes that tickled the Traveller's curiosity. Concession was unlikely, but he wanted that chat. "Sure, why not."
The Overload was propped up at the head of his cave, splayed atop some shapely rocks and protruding above his smaller Mutant brethren. Not that he needed the boost, the creature clearly stood a head above any of them on his own. The Mutant throngs looked over in hatred as the squishy human Traveller entered the sprawling chamber, and obediently stepped aside in his wake, happy to enclose him in walls of green. Maybe they heard about the way he and the children had managed to kill a few of their own, maybe they were fantasising about how easy it would be tear the Traveller limb-from-limb the second they got the word. Whatever their deepest desire, they sealed them within, demonstrating more restraint than most who knew Super Mutants would ever think possible.
Dawes, who was busy struggling not to butcher his own string of speech, glowered when the human appeared from within his retinue, walking right up to his face with a barefaced boldness he had probably never known a human to possess. The other Mutants all kept a respectful, and maybe even a bit fearful, distance as the Overlord climbed off his plinth and bent his huge warped spine far down enough to look at the man eye-to-eye.
"Human." It growled with a breath like dried carcasses, baked and roasting under the Mojave sun. "You intrude."
The Traveller met his gaze with an unflinching mirror, as firm as he would be staring down a charging bear. And just as close to the lethal taste of a violent mauling. "Dawes. Pencil-man wanted us to meet."
Dawes huffed a gust of air out of one over-stretched nostril. "Pencil-Man soft. Weak. He wants to talk. Always talk. Super Mutants grow tired of talking. And waiting."
"He thinks I'm going to find something in you. Some glimmering diamond in all your mush. Something worth saving. But do you know what I think? I think you're an animal, without the innocence. Sentenced by virtue of your own sentience. Do you know what the means? Probably not. It means I think you're cruel, you're violent, you're monstrous. And I think you choose to be. I think that's what you want to be."
Dawes grotesque face was stone. It did not scowl, did not contort, it did not so much as grimace as he received every syllable of the bitter human's scorn. Perhaps not understand the nuance and meaning behind every individual word, but clearly reading the righteous hated barely concealed behind those eyes. " 'What we want'..." It's stretched maw mimicked his facial movements. Then it lifted one large green finger and poked it in the Traveller's face. "We want that."
"You want... me?"
"You are angry. Mutants are angry. But you are more. Human is bitter, resents. But is smart; resourceful." It waved it's digit with each point. "Human survive because human more than Mutant. Capable as Super Mutant. More! We want- I want that."
The Traveller digested that, having received much more of a dialogue than he honestly expected. "So that's what it's about, is it? You want to be smarter so you can, what? Conquer more? Hunt harder targets? Burn bigger settlements? You don't care about reform, that's just the dream Mauderlaine sleeps with, isn't it? Maybe that's all your capable of in that diseased lump you call a heart. I'm not letting you lay a hand on that girl."
It understood that well enough. "Mutants have waited long enough!" The Overlord raised his voice enough that a cave worth of Super Mutant echoes could do little to drown it out. "We will have our cure, we will have human strength. You will not take Mutant destiny away!" In it's primal rage the Mutant left the heavy barrel of his heavy Gatling laser behind as he balled his hammer fists. Deadly enough weapons on their own right, a single punch could probably scramble a man's brains to mush. The Traveller did not flinch.
"You won't have the girl. But you won't harm me either. Because you need what I have." Any Mutant with enough of a brain left to even comprehend those words looked about its brethren confused. All except Dawes who remained affixed with murderous intent. "If it's blood you want, it's mine you'll need."
Doctor Mauderlaine chuckled like a mad man as he remained glued to the eye-piece of his industrial microscope, zoomed in on the DNA of the Traveller's freshly provided blood sample.
"This is incredible! Beyond a miracle! Look how it's replicating and repairing itself like that, look!" He excitedly tried to beckon the Traveller over to gaze at his own extracted plasma, but the man simply winced and waved him off.
"I'm already pretty familiar with it myself." He leaned a bit off the little stool the doctor had provided him as he took his sample, trying to account for the sense of dizziness inevitable after any blood extraction. "Honestly, when I was younger it used to replicate a little faster if you can believe that."
"I frankly don't. I don't believe any of this, it simply; defies belief! These cells are self renewing; anything that tries to pull their fabric apart is thwarted as they stitch themselves back together, it's as though radiation never even touched them! To think that I was just fixated with acquiring the only slightly contaminated blood of a child when before me stood a simple wonder-case of uniquely propertied blood unlike any the world has seen! To think that radiation could produce such an incredible mutation in a person. I assume this spectacular phenom is the results of some kind of mutation, correct?" The Doctor pressed with clinical eagerness.
"What else could it be?" The Traveller shrugged. A crumb of truth painted a fuller picture. Especially for an oblivious intellectual like the good Doctor. True to his assessment, Mauderlaine nodded dumbly and returned to wondering at his marvellous sample.
"How long have you had blood like this?"
"Very long." The Traveller smirked. "Since birth."
"Do you have any idea how outstandingly valuable this is?" Mauderlaine was practically shaking with excitement. "Not just to what I'm doing, but for simply any pursuit based in the blood? In genetics at large?"
"Valuable enough to have your Super Mutants relocated for a party of Tribals to come through these caves?"
"Hmm?" He looked up, as though totally unaware anyone else was even still present in the room. "Of course! We're not going to be needing these caves much longer anyway! Not after this! We'll be able to move onto prototype fabrication, and perform some test trials on a few of those horrible Centaur things my patients like to carry around, before mass production in a matter of... goodness it could be as little as weeks now! All thanks to you!"
The Traveller smiled genuinely for the first time since finding the Mutant hovel, the lines of his tired face pulled uncomfortable at the exertion. "Good doing business with you, but before I collect the kids and go I need to ask you something, Doctor."
The old Ghoul tapped non existent glasses to the bridge of his long-vanished nose. "Oh, what's that?"
"You already told me you learnt to work with West-Tek, the company who themselves invented the FEV, which of course created the Super Mutant."
He nodded. "A terrible mistake."
"And you also told me that you worked as ancillary staff at West-Tek; a glorified lab assistant or something, right?" The Traveller probed.
"I don't think that's exactly what I-"
"But the FEV was a secret project." He continued. "Every document I've ever studied on the matter says that even the most privileged of eyes needed explicit high-level military clearance even within the 'Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Division' to so much as sweep the floors around the early FEV prototypes. And we have you, not even an officially sanctioned employee on the books. And yet apparently a superstar employee they let enrol directly into a position at their top secret labs? It doesn't sound particularly sound, does it? And that's because it isn't. It was all a lie, you never worked as West-Tek."
Mauderlaine went unnaturally still as his face settled down from the usual dopey whimsy into a colder and sterner resting state. "No, I never lied to you, not once. I did work at West-Tek back when that was a badge of honour any Geneticist would kill to have sitting on their resume!"
"But you never worked on the FEV. Heck, I bet you never even heard of it while employed there!"
The Ghoul Doctor nodded. "No. No I never worked in the NBC Division, I discovered what those madmen wrought the same time everybody else in the Wasteland did, when that monster released those poor deformed creatures upon the land like a plague. I watched in horror as settlements all up the coast were picked clean and tasted the disgust of realising that calamity was synthesised under the very roof I worked. I never created the FEV, but I damn well am going to cure it!"
"But why?" The Traveller pressed. "This isn't your cross to bear. No one is holding the Super Mutant plague over you, no one but you. Why chain yourself to someone else's responsibility? Spend all this time working on fixing the Super Mutants? When not spend that time helping the wastes or- or yourself? In this line of work you could have put those years toward fixing ghoulification!"
The Doctor's brow creased as though he could not quite understand the question being asked. Then he tipped back his head, as some understanding hit him, and he softened back into himself once more. "I have the knowledge, talents and opportunity to fix a mistake in our world. That makes it my responsibility. Even if I wasn't a West-Tek alum, if I was a Geneticist for any number of it's competitors, somehow and someway this would still become my life's work. The onus falls on the ready, not the guilty. And this is a struggle I've always been ready for."
The Traveller watched on cautiously as the good doctor and his hulking Overlord 'patient' conferred quietly, then made their plans to leave. He paid especially close attention to each mutant assigned to packing their various totems and weapons in the large wagons pulled by their mutated hound beasts, just to make sure none of them left any nasty surprises behind. But whatever influence Mauderlaine had over the Mutant hoard was enough to drive them away peaceably, if grumpily. Dawes was the last to leave his massive cave home and vanguard his hoards journey to the northern caves, through tunnels stretching neither back the way the Tribes had entered nor the direction they were headed. As he looked across the old stomping grounds with some rage-addled derivative of nostalgia, his beady white gaze eventually settled on the Traveller, bitterly watching him back. Perhaps somewhere in that mass of distorted muscle lay some vague recognition of what he had provided them, and in a dozen years maybe that sprout could fester into some shadow of gratitude. But all the Traveller could see was hatred, and that was a sentiment happily returned. Then Dawes left, and the cave of the Super Mutants went quiet.
Lari was silent all the way on their way back to the Displaced tribes, and whilst escorting the Displaced in a procession through the tight twist of tunnels and passageways that would lead them to their new settling grounds, directly in the spacious conference cave that Catha has first scouted. The old quietly grumbled and withdrew into themselves as they left their sky behind for, as far as any of them were aware, good. "Whereas the children were alive wonder at the strange bioluminescent shades of fauna that only grew that deep under the earth. Catha was ever not the silent one, and she wanted to know everything about how the Traveller had got the Super Mutants to leave. What it is they wanted, how the Traveller stood down Dawes and what the accord they eventually reached was. And of course...
"Why would you give the doctor your blood if you knew it could cure the Mutants?" She glanced up with big brown eyes could melt steel with their laser-like intensity. "I thought you hated Mutants, why would you help them?"
"Is that what you think I did?" The Traveller smirked.
"Um... didn't you? I'm confused,"
"I gave away my blood because I think Mauderlaine might actually be able to do it, the crazy old coot. And if he does end up restoring the Super Mutant army to their human minds and bodies, I wanted them to have every capability returned to them" His eyes became shadows again, turning his face a little scary to Catha.
"W-why?"
"Because once they are freed of all that constant rage, then they'll be able to feel joy again. And bitterness, and fear, sadness, confusion, boredom. And remorse. Yes, they'll feel remorse. Crushing, soul rending, remorse. It will be like wearing their crimes as lashes, flaying them alive. When they remember what they did as Mutants, that will destroy them. I imagine most will go mad, try to end themselves right there. And the others will become broken shadows forced to live as haunted phantoms of men until their bodies just can't take the guilt anymore and they give up. That is why I gave them my blood. To see how many survive that slow death."
"Oh. Okay." Catha didn't speak to The Traveller anymore for the rest of that day.
The various Tribes helped each other settle in the new dark, they held each other's hands, sang softly and remained staunchly mostly inside their own tents so as not to look up towards the rocky enclosed sky. The caves themselves were narrower than the grotto, such that some smaller tents could not be set up at all, forcing some to bunk with their neighbours under large canopies, sleeping bags slotted head to foot like sardines. The Tribe Elders could not even erect their circle, let alone mix their blend of smokes and smells, and so were forced to huddle with everyone else for the night. Sleep came fitful and slow for most of the Tribal, as they fearfully considered themselves laying down in their own burial plot.
The Traveller had no such issues, rough living was a way of life to most surviving in the modern day, and a decently sturdy cave made for somewhat decent accommodation on some of the worst days out there. Then again, maybe it was all those years growing up with a solid roof over his head that acclimatised him to this way of life.
Seer Pinac, strangely enough, also had trouble getting to rest amidst all the others, as the Traveller realised when he followed the trail of echoing coughs deep into the cave system and found the old man hacking up whilst squatting down in the plunge where that mutant Venus Flytrap had attacked those Super Mutants. Quite the dangerous descent for an old man to take by himself, but Pinac was never one to demonstrate his age if he could help it. Down by the patch of ground where the plant has grown out of, were tufts of unsettlingly green grass jutting out between cracks in the rock face. Pinac had pulled a handful of them and bought them to his nose as the Traveller came down to see him.
"They smell of nothing." The Seer informed him as he drew closer. "Try it."
He did so, taking the green grass blades and detecting nothing of the aura of chlorophyll, the earthiness of sodden dirt or any of the properties that make the scent of grass appealing. It seemed all the vibrancy had died with the Flytrap itself . It was like tasting water, or breadfruit. "Well, they aren't supposed to grow down here anyway. Genetic manipulation leaves something to be desired when compared to the real thing I suppose." Pinac nodded absently, then doubled over with another fit of wracking coughs. He had a roll of cough ready to catch his discharge, and tried to quickly hide the cloth as it came back red.
"You had trouble sleeping too?" The old man asked.
"Not trouble, no. I just... don't feel tired. How about you, Seer? You don't appear to be holding up too well." The Traveller nodded towards the pull of fabric the old man had scrunched in a tight fist.
Pinac's leather-like face creased into a tight grin. "Much as with the others, this environment does not agree with me much. Losing the sky and sun can take a tough toll on a body so used to it all. But the discomfort shall pass, I will be okay." He lied.
The two of them shared an accord of a truth unspoken, and the Traveller reflected again on the journey they had ahead of them, and this New Home the Displaced were so desperate to reach. A fresh start where all the baggage and burdens would be left behind, a new beginning. It sounded nice, for those entitled to it. But not everyone has another start left in them.
"You talked a lot about Cede and what he wanted for the tribe, but you barely talk about his brother. You said he was against taking those new tribes into the valley back then?"
Old man Pinac shook his head as he gratefully gave himself over into the memory of it all. "Ketel was his name, and my boy was a spark of brilliance. Sharp but precise, his was a mind that never needed a lesson repeated or rearranged, he could absorb, understand and relay information with intuitive simplicity; just like one of those machines you have." He nodded to the Traveller's wrist computer. "The role of Foreman was an afterthought to that boy, within a matter of years he had reworked all of our production methods and techniques of working the soil to the point where oversight was nearly redundant. Perhaps that was why he felt comfortable weighing in so often to the governing of the Tribe, perhaps he thought himself a better candidate than Cede was. Or perhaps he was merely the only one with the courage to say what was in all of our hearts.
Cede and Ketel bickered often when they young, siblings tend to compete in that way, I know me and my sisters did often. But their competition never seemed to end, even into adulthood. And once we lost Liba, my daughter-in-law and Cede's wife, Ketel became his heel. Every policy decision was met with dissent and aggravation, every refugee tribe that Cede gave sanctuary to fuelled Ketel's fire and passion, and when the predictions he had made started to come true, when bellies began going unfed for longer and crops started to produce smaller gains from exhausted soil, the aggrieved and upset stopped listening to the fair voice of their leader, and instead looked to the pointing finger blaming him for their woes. My boy was loving, Chief Cede, but he was soft and forgiving. Ketel rode his name in the dirt before the whole tribe, and often! I would scold the boy when I could, but young blood runs faster and louder than an old man's chastising. Cede never fought back with his brother, never raised his voice, never stood up for his choice to be the shelter for so many. And so when Ketel decided that he had enough, and chose to leave the valley entirely, Cede had no hold to make him stay. Or the swathes of Dead Trees that had supported Ketel for so long that they left with him. They slipped out from the basin through the same routes that the Doves had used to slip in, and they left many wives without husbands and children without their fathers.
I cannot tell you why Cede never stopped him the day he announced he would leave, in front of me and the whole tribe, but I suspect that it was because he, like us, never expected them to stay gone. We thought they would be back in a few days, maybe with louder words but humbled by the outside world which the Doves reported was so unforgivingly harsh. Then we expected their journey to last weeks, then months. I still have trouble understanding it. So many men leaving their families without so much as a word. Ketel never married, his ties to the tribe were in an authority he never had love or respect for, but his followers... I shudder to think what the words of a clever man can make of the honest."
The Traveller felt the waves of sorrow washing over the old man as his embattled sons haunted him. But even that pitiful state could not abate his own concerns. "Why would Cede let Ketel just leave like that? Why would he let relations get bad enough to the point where Ketel would leave?"
"Perhaps he never thought that his brother would." The old Man offered. "Those two were constants in each other's lives. Squabbling and arguing though they were, they always lived in the same tents, pursued the same milestones, warred over the same activities. They even both fell for the same woman, who would eventually become the mother of Cede's child. When you live like that for your whole life, the prospect of that other constant half just leaving must have would be... unimaginable."
"But he could have seen that coming. He should have! You said Ketel was a source of public dissent and the Chief did nothing to manage the situation? He never took Ketel aside and laid down rules and boundaries? Not for the health of the tribes? Then can you really say that Ketel's leaving was a consequence of anything but Cede's negligence?" The Traveller let everything out, this time minding his temper for no man. Not even those men's father.
Pinac's eyes were shadows. "No. I cannot. Cede wanted desperately to be a just leader, to hear out everyone as fairly as he could, but those same ideals he grew strong with were his weakness too. I wish I could tell you I stood by every choice my son made, but I do not. I would not endure how Ketel treated him if he were my own brother. But then I never experienced such extraordinary circumstances in my time. Who can say the person they would be when confronted with the unpredictable?"
"Being reliable when facing the unexpected is the hallmark of leadership. If Cede couldn't do that, if he never had that... then maybe Ketel was right. Maybe there was no future arguing, maybe leaving was the only choice." The Traveller's words spoke to Pinac's heart, tugging the darkness he foisted there all those years ago. But still the Old man shook his head.
"No. Ketel was a smart boy. He was prudent. But he did not make the right choice that day."
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