Work Text:
First holotape, found near entrance to Griffin-Wells facility
What a rough day. I thought we’d have it easy if we came to the Glowing Sea properly prepared, but boy was I wrong. I’ve got my power armour and MacCready brought enough Rad-X to put Doc Weathers out of business. I’m kitted out with a few guns, obviously, and MacCready’s still the best shot in the Commonwealth. What could have gone wrong?
[Sound of another man laughing.]
Yeah, yeah. As it turns out, lots of stuff. Obviously. The Wasteland is very keen on coming up with creative ways to kill us, and all the Rad-X in the world can’t protect someone from a direct hit. The plan was to never let anything get close enough to do that – hence the hundred-and-fifteen-pound armoury I’m clunking around everywhere with – but some things just don’t want to stay dead.
We were moving through a fallen group of ghouls we’d already shot to bits from a distance when MacCready yelled out – one of the fuckers was only pretending and had clawed his leg when we walked past them. Fuckers. I really, really hate when they do that.
Not that I like feral ghouls at the best of times. But this was kinda weird – we never actually saw it happen. I just heard MacCready yell, and when I turned around he had already shot the thing – again – through the skull. Made a horrible mess, but there was no death rattle. By all accounts, that thing was already dead. It looked too far away from MacCready to have slashed at his leg like that, the way it was lying. Not to mention I was fucking sure we’d already killed them all. I guess maybe the intense radiation around here can regenerate them? I don’t know. But what the hell else could it be? There was nothing else around.
The only lucky thing is that we were so near to this facility. It’s obviously abandoned, and should offer us a bit of shelter while I tend to MacCready’s wound. Stimpak or no, he’s not going to be walking good for at least a few hours, and it’s better that we recover here.
[Sound of another man groaning in protest.]
Shut up, we have to play it safe. Yeah, this is some sort of military base, it looks like, from before the bombs fell. There’s a railing around some stairs that spiral down the walls to… fuck knows where. It looks deep. Mine shaft deep. I leaned over the edge, but I can’t see the bottom. It’s dark. If we were in better shape I’d say we should go exploring, but we’re supposed to be finding Virgil in some blasted cave out here, and I’d rather just get on with that as soon as MacCready’s recovered. We’ve already had one thing go wrong; I’d rather not push my luck out here. Especially since I’m ‘smart but no good at surviving’, right?
[Sound of another man scoffing.]
Heh. Mac says I do that. That I get too caught up in my own thoughts sometimes to notice the most obvious things. Hey, but I’m not the one that got hurt, right?
[Three seconds of silence.]
That’s what I thought. One fucking point to me, thank you very much.
Second holotape, found in cafeteria two floors down
It looks like we might be here longer than I’d planned. I’ve given MacCready three stimpaks already, and he says he feels a little better, but I think he’s just putting on a brave face. That wound of his is refusing to heal properly. He thinks some rest should help, though, so I took a preliminary look around this place – there’s this cafeteria sort of area a couple of flights down, and a bunch of other doors I can’t open myself. MacCready says he’ll have a go at lockpicking them before we go, which seems to have given him something to look forward to.
Only thing is, I’m worrying about my power armour. We’ve got so much Rad-X, still, that we could literally last weeks out here, and with the sealed military rations I’ve managed to find and crack open there’s easily enough to keep us going. We only have a couple of spare power cores, though, so I’ve made the decision to step out of the suit for a while and share MacCready’s supply. It’s for the best, and I don’t really need the armour since – as luck would have it – there’s literally nothing living here. I was so worried the place would be crawling with ghouls or radscorpions or whatever, but we haven’t found any traces of anything living here. Well, not since before the bombs. Obviously. I wonder what this place was for?
[Six seconds of silence.]
Mac, does Griffin-Wells sound familiar to you at all?
[Sound of another man shrugging.]
Huh. It kind of does for me, but I can’t place it. Maybe he was a big entrepreneur before the war. Or… two of them, I suppose, if it’s named after two people.
Out of curiosity I removed my power armour’s most powerful light and shone it down the centre of the stairwell to try and get a scope for how big this place is – I couldn’t even see to the bottom. This place wasn’t just buried by sand; it was always deep underground.
And… now I can hear a radstorm raging outside. Maybe needing to take shelter was a blessing in disguise; I wouldn’t want to be out there in that. For now all we can do is sit here and wait for MacCready’s leg to get better. Hey, go easy on that thing, will ya?
Third holotape, found in medical facility five floors down
Kinda beginning to panic a bit, here. I’m recording this while MacCready’s asleep because I don’t want him to know I’m worried. I’m… I know I’m supposed to be strong for him, but fuck me, I don’t know what we’re gonna do.
Ten stimpaks hasn’t been enough to heal MacCready’s leg. Ten. That should be enough to resurrect a fucking corpse and it hasn’t made the slightest difference. I plugged him with everything we’ve got and he asked me to stop, saying it was making his heart race. I couldn’t bear to tell him that I didn’t have any more anyway, and that if this doesn’t work, there’s not much else I can do. I just… I don’t understand why it isn’t working.
How could this even happen? Maybe the ghoul that slashed MacCready’s leg was infected with something. Something really bad. I’ve never heard of anything like it, but maybe a doctor out there somewhere has? If I can get him back to Diamond City, or literally anywhere, maybe they can help him.
I’m terrified he’s going to lose his leg, but for now, he’s still struggling on. He can’t put any weight on it now, though, and when the stimpaks didn’t work I realised I had to make a difficult choice. Help him back up the stairs and outside, while we hobble back to the edge of the Glowing Sea and hope we’re not ambushed along the way? or go a few floors deeper into this place, gambling on the assumption that they might have better, pre-war medicine here, and knowing that MacCready won’t be able to climb those stairs again by himself unless he gets better?
I made my choice. Here we are, in some kind of doctor’s facility, and it seems my gamble paid off. They’ve got a lot of good stuff here, including Med-X, which if nothing else is reducing the pain. At least we’re not at much risk of getting attacked by surface monsters this far down. The place gives me the creeps, but at least it’s silent.
…At least, I think it is. MacCready, whose hearing is usually much better than mine, swore he thought he heard something. Something… moving around, much deeper down. I didn’t hear anything, but I had a look about to calm his nerves. V.A.T.S. reported absolutely no movement anywhere nearby. He’s probably just jumpy – or feverish.
[Nine seconds of silence.]
Why the fuck wouldn’t there be anything living here, anyway? Isn’t that… isn’t that more odd?
Fourth holotape, found in surgical facility nine floors down
[Seven seconds of shaky breathing.]
MacCready’s gotten worse. He’s really pasty, and keeps dipping in and out of consciousness. I’m getting desperate, but I hacked a medical computer in the doctor’s place upstairs which made reference to some sort of… more robust surgical place down here. I hoped they might have better equipment – and by God do they.
Even Frankenstein would be horrified. There are surgical tables here for… patients, I pray, to lie down on, but I have no idea of the function of these spidery, metallic machines they’re cradled in. Every table is surrounded by these imposing robotic arms, a little like a Mr Handy’s, but even less friendly. They look like they could rip a person open in seconds, if they wanted to, and even though I know this building lost power a very long time ago, a part of me was terrified that if I set MacCready down in one of them it would spring to life and eviscerate him before my eyes.
…Luckily, that didn’t happen.
A part of me was hoping it wouldn’t come to this – that there’d be some miracle cure down here for whatever MacCready’s got; that I could pump it straight into his veins and save him. I’ve searched every cupboard, though, and found nothing that we haven’t already tried. I… oh Jesus. I’m going to have to amputate his leg.
[Eight seconds of shaky breathing.]
…I’ve been trying not to think about it, but… the claw marks are too big. They’re too big for a ghoul to have done this. They’re… terrifyingly big. But… nothing else makes sense.
Alright, stop it Nate, stop it Nate, you’re getting lost in your own thoughts again. Just like MacCready always says. Come on. Calm down.
[Ten seconds of deep breaths.]
Alright. Amputation. There’s enough Med-X to make it painless, but I’m not a fucking surgeon. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I can sanitise these tools and… fuck, I think this one is a bone cutter. I’ve sold enough to junk vendors that I should really know by now, shouldn’t I? Haha. It looks high quality, so at least there’s that. Oh, but it won’t… it won’t turn on. Oh. Obviously. Two centuries old. I’ll just have to use the… the saw.
[Four seconds of silence.]
Christ, I’m nervous. Okay, okay, there’s a load more stimpaks here, though, so I just need to administer them quickly enough during and after cutting his leg off to… to stop him from bleeding out. Fuck. I can’t lose him. I… I love him. I really fucking love him, and he’s not awake enough for me to even tell him that right now. I hope he knows.
Alright, I’m just going to— what the fuck?
[Twenty seconds of silence. Footsteps. Fifteen more seconds of silence.]
Hello? Is… is anyone…?
[Eight more seconds of silence.]
Fuck, what am I saying, of course there’s no one here. I just… fuck, that was the weirdest thing. I felt someone… or at least, I thought I felt someone… breathing. On the back of my neck, while I was talking into the recorder just now. Shit. I… I must be imagining it, though, because there’s nothing here. I spun right around and there’s nothing there. I looked around. Nothing.
…I could have sworn I actually heard breathing, though. Fuck me. Must have just been a draught, and… my overstimulated imagination added the rest. Never mind. There’s nothing here. We’ve checked a thousand times. I’ve just got to… got to focus on MacCready.
[Seven seconds of silence.]
There is nothing here.
Fifth holotape, found by MacCready’s body eleven floors down
[Twenty five seconds of tired, shaky sobbing.]
Look what you’ve done, you… you fucking idiot! Nate! You stupid fucking idiot, look what you’ve let happen!
[Nineteen more seconds of crying.]
This is your fault! You stupid fucking idiot!
MacCready, he… fuck, he wasn’t doing so well… I botched the surgery. I couldn’t… cut his leg off all the way. He was screaming in pain, because I must’ve misjudged how much Med-X to give him, and I started shaking. I lost my nerve cos I knew I was hurting him, and… oh, fuck, I’m such a fucking idiot!
Why did I have to leave him? I fucking hate myself. I did get the leg off, in the end, and I gave him the stimpaks, and he looked like he was going to survive. He looked like he was going to survive! But he was still delirious, babbling all stuff that didn’t make sense, and I didn’t want to drag him all the way upstairs back to the cafeteria where the food is… so I thought I’d put him in the power armour. You don’t need two legs to even work one of those things, right? I thought he’d be fine. Fuck…
I’m a stupid fucking idiot, though, and obviously I’d left the power armour upstairs. Because why the fuck wouldn’t I? I haven’t worn it since I stepped out of it – trying to conserve our power cores – so I had to run back up seven flights of stairs to get it. I climb inside, I start clunking back down to MacCready, and around the third floor I heard him scream.
[Sixteen seconds of crying.]
God, I ran. I ran so fast I cannoned into the fucking walls, but there’s only so much speed I can turn corners with in this fucking thing, and by the time I got back down to the surgical facility… fuck, MacCready was gone…
So I followed the trail of blood… it led out the door and further down the stairs… I thought maybe he’d wandered off, hopped up on drugs and not knowing what he was doing, but… when I finally found him… Jesus, when I finally found him, he… fuck, he’s been ripped apart!
[Eleven more seconds of crying.]
It wasn’t no fucking ghoul that slashed his leg yesterday. I knew I was right to be suspicious. It was something else. Something… we can’t fucking see. And that’s what took him, in the end.
But I’m gonna find it. I’m gonna find whatever the fuck did this. I’m gonna find it and I’m gonna fucking annihilate it. If there’s something living down here and it killed my MacCready, I’m gonna kill it too. I don’t… nothing else matters to me, now. Fuck the Institute. Fuck Virgil, fuck Kellogg, fuck everything.
[Ten seconds of silence.]
Shaun is probably already dead anyway.
Sixth holotape, found in research facility twenty three floors down
Every time I look behind me… fuck… there’s nothing there. I keep hearing it. I hear it walking up behind me. I hear its heavy footsteps. I hear clangs and crashes as it knocks things out of the way – cabinets, beds, desks, lab equipment. I thought I was imagining it at first, seeing things move out of the corner of my eye, but it’s definitely real. I hear it coming up behind me but when I spin around I see nothing. V.A.T.S. sees nothing. Only the flickering, swaying lights of this bad and haunted place.
Haunted. There’s a fucking word I never thought I’d catch myself using. What else am I supposed to think, though? I’ve never seen a miracle, but I’ve sure as shit seen a hell of a lot of impossible horrors in my time.
Going against all my instincts, I’ve decided to leave the power armour behind. I’ve seen claw marks down here, decorating the walls and floors, that have cut through metal like it were wax. I’d rather be quick on my feet, because I need to be able to turn around fast enough that this thing stops following me. Turning around and facing it is the only thing that seems to make it stop.
[Five seconds of silence.]
I sound insane.
[Eight more seconds of silence.]
Am I insane?
[Twenty seconds of silence.]
Did I make all of this up? Did I kill MacCready? We always said there was nothing else around. What if… what if it’s me?
[Twelve seconds of silence, followed by sound of self-induced injury with a blunt weapon.]
Stop it! Stop it! No you didn’t! Just… fucking… keep… focused.
So. Fuck. I’ve got a plan, though. A single bullet designed to kill anything. Tinker Tom designed it. Said it would stop anything that moves from ever moving again – synth, human, ghoul, animal, whatever. I’ve got a feeling it’ll be the only thing that has the slightest chance of working against… whatever this is. Demon. Spirit. I don’t care. But, fuck, I’ve got to be quick. I’ve got to let it get close to me, and… fuck… I don’t know if I have the fucking nerve.
If I just knew what the fuck this thing was! Does it have something to do with… with this place? Whatever it was used for, before the war?
What if it’s a… a prisoner? What if the military found it centuries ago… and kept it under guard, locked deep underground… and then when the bombs fell… when the power was lost… when the locks failed…
[Sound of distant footsteps approaching.]
No, no, that doesn’t sound right. I was in the military. I would have heard about something like that. Wouldn’t I?
[Heavy footsteps getting nearer.]
But the name of the place did sound familiar. I’ve tried hacking the computers, but everything good is classified – all I can work out from the records is that they had a lot of surgical patients, all of them military, and none of them survived. Maybe there’s— GAH, FUCK!
[Screaming. Heavy footsteps retreating. Panicked hyperventilation.]
Fuck, my… my leg! It fucking… shit!
[Sound of needles scattering across floor, followed by injection.]
Oh fuck… oh Jesus… oh fuck…
[Thirty seconds of breathing eventually slowing to near normal.]
You were right, MacCready. I do get caught up in my own thoughts.
[Seventeen seconds of silence, followed by quiet sobbing.]
If only you’d been here.
Seventh holotape, found by Nate’s body fifty seven floors down
[Sound of shaky breathing, followed by a match being struck. A cigarette is lit and deeply inhaled.]
Fuck.
[Coughing.]
This is gonna be my last holotape, I think. As in, ever.
[Five seconds of silence.]
I knew I was a gonner as soon as that fucking thing got my leg. No way of healing it, and while it’s hard enough… getting down those stairs… fuck me, it’d be impossible to get back up. I have no clue what floor I’m on by now. There’s numbers painted in the stairwell but I can’t read them anymore. They look alien to me. I guess it’s the fever, the blood loss, the whatever-the-fuck is coursing through my veins.
[Coughing.]
I never smoked. Always told MacCready off for it. These are his cigarettes. Figured someone should use them.
They got all these… these vats down here, these canisters, full of some kind of gas or plasma or I don’t fucking know. There’s all these… these pipes, and it’s coming up out of the floor, like they were harvesting something from deep underground here. Think it’s radioactive; the Geiger on my Pip-Boy’s going fucking nuts. Like, more than usual, I mean, for the Glowing fucking Sea.
There’s a load of workstations… looks like there were a lot of researchers here. There’s a command console in the middle of the room but I’ve tried it, it’s fritzed. There’s a couple of— fuck, what am I doing? There’s no way this holotape is going anywhere. If you’re hearing it, you already know, cos you’re here too.
[Nine seconds of silence.]
You’re here too.
[Ten seconds of silence.]
So why the fuck am I recording this? Fuck, right, I know why. Two reasons. Got to keep it together.
[Deep inhale and exhale. More coughing.]
Sorry.
Okay, first thing. I realised what Griffin-Wells means. See I searched through all the fucking computers, expecting to find at some point that it was set up by some commanding officers with those names, or originally built with money from benefactors with those names, or some shit like that. But every record I found pointed to people with totally different surnames.
Figured it out, though. It is two names, but they’re taken from what this facility was supposed to be designed for – a character and its author.
[Coughing. Spluttering.]
The Invisible Man.
[More coughing.]
It’s a deathclaw. If you haven’t figured that out yet from your own encounter with it, or you’ve just been lucky enough to get down this far without it catching you, then there you go. You’re gonna need to know that, cos you may have made it down this far, but you’ll never make it out again. Not without it finding you.
They were trying to make some kind of super soldier. Invisible skin. Every human being they did the surgery on died, and the project was abandoned… but it turns out they were onto something. Humans might have been too weak, but there’s one thing out there, one unholy predator, strong enough to accidentally ingest the serum and survive.
[Sound of distant footsteps approaching.]
Alright, alright, I don’t fucking have long. And neither do you, I’ll bet. I’ve left the gun on top of the console. Grab it. Grab it now. The bullet will only work if you get under its skin – in an eye or in its mouth. Shame it’s fucking invisible.
My arm is too shaky. I’ve lost too much blood. No stimpaks left. I’d never hit it, and even if I did, I can never make it back up those stairs. So… I’m leaving it for you. Whoever’s hearing this.
[Heavy footsteps getting nearer.]
Unless it got your leg first, too. Just like me. Just like MacCready. Seems it has a penchant for wounding us. Playing with us. Fuck.
[Bestial roar. Metallic objects clattering to the floor.]
If you think you’re a good shot – good enough to hit something you can’t fucking see – then I wish you good luck. And if not… if you don’t think you can make it…
[Footsteps pause, then charge.]
Then do what I did, and leave it for the next guy.
[Sound of evisceration, followed by ripping of flesh with teeth. Tape cuts out.]