The Rejects (AKA The Dirty Half-Dozen, The Six Wanderers)

Bob Perce (Herodian)
Colt Riffle (Gigermann)
Lance Bennett (Ronnke)
Lenny Leonardo (Melissa)
Romeo Sylvester (Rigil Kent)

The One Where They Went to Raider School

12 Jul 2162

Still at Moira’s store, Lance continued to tinker with her practice mine, with Colt’s input, before Sly eventually convinced Moira to let Lance keep it, as a promise to deal with the minefield later. Lance was getting more confident that he might actually be able to disarm the mines without killing everyone near him—not that the others were so convinced.

Now well into the evening, the Rejects left the store to find Sheriff Simms, to get the details on his earlier report of raiders operating out of a nearby abandoned schoolhouse. He pointed out the location—less than a mile to the north, actually within sight of Megaton—and explained that the raiders keep out of sight most of the time, but have occasionally broken into the town and stolen supplies. They weren’t enough of a bother to expend limited town resources to remove them, but a nuisance nonetheless. The Rejects agreed to look into it.

Colt went to the roof of the highest “building” in town, the water processing plant, and using his night-vision gear, scoped out the school a bit, throughout the night; he observed a couple of guys here and there, on watch outside the school. Some time after sunrise, he went around town and, with the others’ help, scrounged up the necessary materials to put together a proper ghillie suit, intending to use it to creep in close to the school and reconnoiter. He slept through the rest of the day and most of the night, rising a few hours before sunrise. Under cover of the early-morning darkness, wearing his new ghillie suit, he silently crept to within a few-hundred yards of the school, as the others observed from the town wall through Sly’s night-vision optics. Colt stayed in his hidden position for most of the day, observing and reporting back to the others via Pip-Boy, before returning after dusk; he counted five individuals overall, lightly armed, emerging from the school building throughout the day.

In the meantime, Lance hit upon an idea to build a remotely-controlled “scout robot” out of available scrap, and started working on it. It took a few days to put it together, but he ended up with a functional device, essentially a smallish, three-wheeled mobile camera, capable of approaching the school and maybe getting a direct look inside, relaying back video to his Pip-Boy. That evening after sunset, Lance launched his new spybot and guided it in close to the school, using the terrain to mask its approach, while Colt crept out once again to his former post. Upon closer inspection, they agreed that the “raiders” outside seemed a bit…inauthentic, somehow.

Lance positioned the spybot in the shadows just outside the front doors, waiting for an opportunity to slip through and get a look inside. The opportunity finally came, though the spybot was spotted in the process of slipping through the doors, so Lance gunned it through to the interior, hoping to get a quick look before the robot was captured. To everyone’s surprise, the room beyond was populated by a number of small children, supervised by a single woman; as the children excitedly chased the robot ’round the room, darting under tables and around school-desks, Lance also spotted a well-used trapdoor toward the back of the room. In a last-ditch effort to save the robot for future use, Lance ramped the spybot off some junk and out of an open window, but it had exceeded its effective control range, and continued on in a straight line out into the wasteland, out of control, never to be seen again.

16 Jul 2162

The next day, convinced that things at the school were not as they appeared, the Rejects walked out openly to the school under a white flag, and Sly requested a parley, which was reluctantly granted. It turned out that the “raider” thing was an act to keep others away, that they didn’t trust the townies at Megaton, and that they had been gathering up orphans wandering the wasteland and sheltering them here. Eventually, the Sheriff was fetched to the parley, and he, Sly, and the woman leading the school “raiders” hammered out a deal; Megaton would effectively incorporate the school, offering protection, free trade, and freedom to continue operating as they had, in exchange for a cessation of their occasional raids on the town.

Notes

• Turk’s player was absent for this session