"OH!" Travis said, digging through a pile of holo-tapes.

"Here's one we haven't heard in a while." He said with a smile. Popping it in, he pressed play.

"It's a good one."

"Here on Diamond City Radio, take it away, Louie."

Leaving Red and her gang behind them, Piper and Nate walked north.

"Why did we let her do that?" She asked. "I'd still take raiders over synths, but compared to Diamond City...it's..."

Nate stayed silent for a moment, walking slower to match Piper's pace. "Je ne sais quois?. If we didn't do that for Red, how long before she figured out Lily was dead on her own, or Tower Tom decided Red wasn't giving her enough food and decides to attack her gang where she lives?"

"I don't know Blue, I just feel tired, sore, beat, and exhausted, and only half the day has gone by. Did we really need to kill those raiders on our way in?"

"If Red sent in her people, it would've been a lot worse. There's no way we could've gotten all the way to Tower Tom without resorting to violence. Even then, if we made it to Tom without killing a single one of Tom's people, I feel Red would've wanted more blood to be shed. She saw the factory, and she saw the fighting that occurred, but she was satisfied. I didn't want to fight, but we would've been under the gun from behind and I didn't want to chance trying to win over ever single raider in our way to Tom. Morally, wrong, but, this morning was a situation where morals don't always guide the situation for the best outcome. Keep smiling, Piper. It'll be worth it. We may have helped a raider gang, but I try to imagine what it must be like living like them if I were in their place. Unlike ourselves...do you think they ever were guarded by the Minutemen growing up?"

Piper shook her head. They walked the traintracks up the incline, and past a greenhouse with Mr. Handy's milling around plants at the GreyGarden community gardens.

"Can't say that they were, Blue. They probably..." Piper trailed off and sighed. "Yeah...I get your point. You already sold me on your past growing up, pretty darn lucky."

"Blessed." Nate looked up the hill, and smiled. "Hey, look who's here." Nate said, pointing up the hill to Meathead bounding down the hill.

Barking a few times, he was happy to see the duo still alive, although a little worse for wear.

"Blessed, lucky, whatever. God's blessings or devils luck, you got it pretty god...Good!" She corrected herself. "You got it pretty good growing up."

"We faced the same type of problems people would today if they stopped fighting, Piper. Resources. Food. Water. Electricity. Take away one of those, and you've got a crisis on your hands. People can live without electricity, they've done that for over five thousand years. It's only in the last four hundred that people started thinking it was an essential part of their lives. It makes for longer nights, it's what is keeping my wife alive right now, but without it, it forces people to communicate in a different way."

"I think I know what I would do now if I lost my sister." Piper said.

"Something like that?" Nate asked, looking to her, and then gesturing back towards Beantown. Meathead reached them, and danced around Nate and Piper. Barking happily, Nate told Meathead to quiet down, and called him a good boy.

She nodded sullenly, looking at Meathead. "I mean, sure we all get those dark thoughts every once and a while, like 'Oh, I'd take a whack at them if they ever did something like that...but she...Red...she went and did it. It's scary knowing what's out here, Blue." She said, looking down at her feet, putting one in front of the other. Petting Meathead on the head, and behind the ears, Piper found the words she meant to say. "I guess we're not the only ones with something to lose. When we get back to Diamond City...people deserve to know what's out here. I still haven't finalized that interview you gave me, haven't had the time, but people are going to flip when they hear all the details. From the super mutants and Giddyups at Atomatoys, to the USS Constitution flying around, and all the people you've met along the way to Diamond City. The details of your past are fascinating,

"Well, do you want to know a benefit of being part of the Nate fan club?" He asked grinning widely.

"What?"

"Hot shower and good night's sleep."

Piper laughed. "Oh man."

"But you gotta thank Meathead too. Without him, I would've been screwed."

Piper squatted down, calling Meathead over to him, "Well, Meathead, you're just the biggest, bestest dog in the whole Commonwealth, you know that?" Piper kissed Meathead on the forehead and Meathead wagged his tail and let his tongue hang out, happy he was feeling the love. Rolling his eyes back, he licked Piper on the cheek again.

Nate laughed and tried to hold back the blush in his cheeks, but his face was burning red. "I'm glad you're here too, Piper. I enjoy being with you."

"Oh, thanks, Blue. That means a lot."

\111/

After passing through Concord, Meathead growled towards the North, and there was a pack of raiders ten blocks away from them moving West. The avoided their attention, not wanting to get drawn into another fight today.

"Now, mind if I ask you something creepy, in the most non-creepiest way possible?"

Piper chuckled, "What?"

Nate pulled his hands in close, speaking in a nasally voice, and making a garish smile with his lips out and showing his teeth, "Wanna come back to my hole in the ground?"

"Not the worst proposition I've ever received, considering the other guy lived in a sewer." Piper replied, rolling her eyes away from Nate. They were coming up along the backside of the Red Rocket Filling Station, just a stone's throw away from Sanctuary Hills.

"We're almost there, Piper. About half an hour. I got someone I want you to meet."

"Here? Where?"

"In Sanctuary Hills, Piper. It's where I used to live before the great war."

Piper stood up striaghter and her eyes widened. "Oh, oh!" Walking through the parking lot of the Red Rocket station, they crossed onto the road leading northwest and were crossing the wooden bridge into Sanctuary Hills. "I used to live in this suburb here, Piper. I want to show you my house."

They rounded up the hill, picking up their pace in the home stretch, they saw the piles of assorted junk and scrap materials laying out infront of houses, with a small organized pile infront of the house opposite of Nate's blue house.

"Here we are, Piper. Welcome to my home." Nate stood at the threshold of his house, and walked inside.

"Codsworth?" He shouted.

It took a moment, but the old Mr. Handy robot came around the backside of the neighbors house and hovered down the block, then he saluted Nate on his safe return home.

"Salutations, Master Nate. How wonderful it is to see you again!"

Piper blinked twice and then smiled brightly, "Piper, I'd like you to meet my Mr. Handy, Codsworth. Codsworth, this is Piper."

"Miss Piper, how excellent it is to meet you. Master Nate hasn't had any guests over in centuries! I was beginning to think everyone was turning into social recluses. HaHa!" Piper's shoulders were tense, but when Codsworth extended a claw to shake hands, she reached out and grabbed it and gave a firm handshake in kind.

\111/

Entering the house, Nate opened the cupboards and found they were stocked again with scavenged food from around the neighborhood. The were a handful of guns sitting in the neighbors driveway, with bullets stacked neatly on their end by Codsworth. The Mr. Handy servant already got to work on breaking down the demolished houses in Sanctuary Hills, with metal plates and bars all cut into the longest pieces possible, along with stacks of wood pulled up and laid out in stacks.

"Codsworth." Nate said to him, digging through his backpack, he pulled out a orange and white holotape marked 'Update.' "I've got something for you."

"Oh, wonderful, Nate. All the new joys of being slightly less buggy and not running into invisible walls are a thing of the past!" Codsworth said. Nate gave the holotape update they got from the General Atomics Galleria. A panel on Codsworth's side flipped down, and then Nate pulled the extension cord from the Pip-Boy and plugged it into Codsworth. The input menu appeared, with the options of shutting the unit down, restarting the unit, restarting the unit to factory settings, or download update and install. There was also a maintenance protocol that could be ran, but required an Administator's password, but since he knew how to get around pesky things like passwords and codes, it wasn't much of a problem for Nate to hack Codsworth, but he never needed to.

The leaves were swept out into the backyard and all the ceiling tiles that fell down over the family's 210 year abscence were in the trash bin. Dangerously overflowing and on the curb, there robot had taken to cleaning the house and entire neighborhood with gusto.

Nate offered Piper a seat on the couch, and stood for a moment looking out at the trash can on the sidewalk.

"Piper, would you like some coffee?"

Piper turned her head up to look at Nate, as she was engrossed with the concept of someone living in a large pre-war house.

"Can't say that I've ever had coffee before, Blue. I heard about it. Might'a tried it. Very bitter and tastes like dirt? Is that right?"

"You'll love it, Piper. I know how to make a very good cup of coffee. It's all about time and temperature."

Nate looked out through the living room window for another moment, lost in thought now that he was home, and then went to the kitchen. He stared at the stove top for a moment and realized there was no electricity nor gas to power the stove. Rummaging through the cupboards, the hinges opened with a rusty squeak, and clicked closed after Nate pulled out a lighter, a french press coffee maker, a sealed coffee tin, and a jar of honey that turned into a crystallized block of sugar, and set everything on the counter.

Piper came over and looked down at the counter, and picked up a weathered comic book Nate left on the counter two centuries earlier.

"Groknak. The forest of the Bat-Babies." She read, Nate turned around with a cast iron coffee pot in his hands and posed a questioning look to her.

"You're comic book, here." She said, picking it up, showing Nate the cover, and setting it back down again. "This is...ah...really your house."

"I'll give you the grand tour in just a few minutes. I need to put some water on to boil."

Checking his own faucet, the water came out brown and slow, but slowly turned clearer and clearer over time. Filling the cast iron coffee pot, Nate went outside to his grill, picking up some old wood from a tree that collapsed into his yard and put it inside the bottom of the propane grill. The fire will be contained, he reasoned, and set fire to dried brush and branches, making a small flame within the grill space. Placing the grates over it, Nate put the pot of water onto the grill and went back inside.

"The water will be ready in a few minutes, but I can give you a short tour of the house." Nate said to Piper, Meathead went from room to room, sniffing things out, and ended up laying on down on his stomach in the living room.

"Here we have the kitchen, and dining table. Down the hallway we have the laundry room and backup Mr. Handy Fuel. It looks like Codsworth found some around the neighborhood, cause we're all stocked up. To the left is our bathroom, and then the master bedroom."

The bed was rotted away, nothing was left, not even fibers. The frame to the bed was sagging wood that was crumpled and ready to give in.

"First thing I do, after I rebuild society and put a man on the moon, is get people to make king sized beds again. We had these micro fiber beds, they were so comfy, you would feel like you were sleeping on a cloud."

Meathead rolled over from in the living room, pulling his head up and looking down the hallway towards Nate and Piper. Then he rested his head back down, remembering something.

Piper looked at the mantle, the bureau where yellowed pictures of Nate and Nora proudly stood, still in their photo frames. There was a tri-fold american flag behind it, and a blue medal with yellow stars on it in the shape of the Big Dipper, with the certificate of Nate's Honorable Discharge.

Piper looked at the certificate, and her face twitched, her cheek rising and eye blinking at the same time. She thought she was bit by a mosquito, and wiped her face. "Second Battalion, 108th Regiment." She said. "You were in the United States Army. The real one." She said.

Nate nodded. "Yep, I gave my two years and fought for this country, back when it still was fifty states."

"How big was it?" Piper asked.

"The country or the army?"

"The army."

"Huge." Nate said with a single word, looking down at the ground. "Imagine..." Nate swallowed.

"Imagine every person in Diamond City," Nate exhaled, "Goodneighbor, Bunker Hill, and every person in the entire Commonwealth you've ever met in the last year. Now imagine every single one of those people all fought for the United States Army."

"That's pretty big." Piper said, but Nate shook his head.

"That's nothing." He said, dropping his head to level his eyes with Piper. "That is a small force. There were over three million people in the armed services, Piper. Three million. Start counting out loud and let me know when you get to a million, because it'll take a while. We were spread all across the country, all across the world. A little too thin in some areas, but I'm sure not going to make that mistake. You need to imagine if this entire city of Boston, was completely and fully functional, and then triple that, that's how many soldiers there were in the armed forces."

"What's the medal mean?" Piper asked. Blue stars arranged in the Big Dipper on a small blue and white medal.

"It's a symbol for the Alaskan state flag, to show I fought in Alaska during the Sino-American war. That was after America annexed Canada for its resources."

"Geeze. What a time in the world to be living in."

Nate dug through his top drawer, pulling out his father's medal. "The Annexation of Canada medal. My father never liked it."

It was a striped medal, same as Nate's, but the color scheme was red, white, red, white, red, it was mirroring the Canadian Flag.

"It was crazy, back then. Crazy now too, the only thing that's changed is that people forgot what to fight for. Have you noticed that, Piper?" They moved from the master bedroom and into Shaun's nursery. Piper stooped down, picking up a children's book off the ground that managed to fall underneath the dresser.

"People are always fighting, but usually it's over water or a pile of garbage they think is worth putting people in the ground for." She flipped through the book, the title was 'You're Special!' "What's this?" She asked, flipping from the first page, to the second and third.

"It's a baby's book. It was something we would read to him to keep the baby calm."

"Any thoughts on how you're going to get him from the Institute?" Piper asked.

"Yes." Nate immediately replied. "I've been thinking about how to get inside the Institute, ever since I heard it existed. If it's a bunker, I'll open it. If it's a safe, I'll crack it. If it's a building, I'll get inside. But...getting inside isn't the issue." Nate said, leading Piper back down the hallway, through the kitchen, and into the backyard. "The issue is what happens after we get inside."

She turned her head and kept her eyes on Nate. "What do you mean?"

"So. The Institute has an army of synths. Of robots. How many do you imagine are inside the Institute that we don't know about, that we've never seen? Prototypes, synths, turrets, laser grids, locked doors and vaults inside the Institute? Let's say every single synth has a gun, a laser pistol. Well, now they're an army with laser pistols all fighting for the same objective, even if they're all robots. That's not counting the humans controlling all the synths. Say we get through every single synth. Lay waste to every single robot they have. Blow them up, or shut them down. Some way, some how. We manage to fight off every single one of them and shut down their production plant and keep them from making more. We still wouldn't be anywhere close to being done on fighting the Institute. We would only have eliminated their top layer, but from there, we would need to go deeper. The best kept secrets and the people responsible would be the most well guarded and at the very bottom of this hole they've dug for themselves. Plain and simple. But, that's not all. If they know we're coming for them, Piper. Do you think they will give up if we get in there and get past all their defenses? No. They'll fight. They'll fight because it's part of human instinct to survive, no matter what. So, I imagine they'll fight. And then, only then, I'll find my son, and then what? He may be ten years old, he may be seventy, or even a hundred? What then, Piper?"

"How do I explain that I am his father, when my son is older than me, has never seen my face, and was not raised by me, but whoever it was in the Institute that raised him? For all I know, he was raised by synths programmed to take care of children. That's what we were doing before the war, and I doubt that changed for any of the people who went underground when the bombs fell. They were busy surviving, just like everybody else. The difference between them and Vault 111, is that they had a head start on rebuilding, but instead of taking the towns that people mentioned are picked over, and scrapped to pieces. Instead of building something on the surface to benefit everyone, they take it back underground and keep it there. There isn't a doubt in my mind that I will explain things to him, he may or may not listen to me, he may or may not believe me, but I have doubts that Shaun will even acknowledge my existence as his father."

"Ouch, Nate. I feel what you mean, and you've been putting a lot of thought into this, haven't you? Most people I know can't even imagine a face behind the person pulling the strings, but you're talking about taking them out where they live." Nate nodded.

"They're gonna fucking pay, and I'm gonna make sure they feel it. Best thing about attacking someone who's never been attacked, they won't expect it. They wont have the experience to repel an attack. They can send out robots, but the moment they're faced with the actual danger, they will lose."

"So what's the plan?"

"Let's get some coffee, and I'll tell you all about it. After we get our coffee, I'll show you the Vault too."

Piper was excited as Nate pulled off the pot of lightly bubbling water. It was on the verge of boiling, so Nate quickly dumped three scoops of coffee into the french press, and poured into the water, placing the top over it but not pushing the plunger down.

"How long will that take?"

"It needs to steep for four minutes." Nate looked up to Codsworth, "Codsworth, can you remind me in four minutes?" He asked.

"Yes sir. Shall I get some coffee mugs for you, Master Nate?"

"Yes, thank you, Codsworth." The robot Mr. Handy hovered to the cabinets and pulled out two porcelain coffee mugs.

Nate went to a drawer, pulling out a piece of water logged paper and a pen.

"What's with the 'Master Nate', thing?"

"That's how they were programmed. Don't let me forget," Nate said, writing up a list. "I've got a few plans. Number one. Show you the vault. Number two show you my big secret."

The last one got Piper interested and leaning in. "So what's the secret?"

"Not yet, gotta be patient and open minded when we show you. Emphasis on we."

Piper looked over her left shoulder towards Codsworth. "We...as in...you and Codsworth, here?"

"Close. But again, you'll see once were up in the Vault. All you need to do is suspend your disbelief for a little while longer, and let the suspense build."

"Alright, I think I can do that. What else?"

"Number three. Take a shower, get some rest. Four, see what I can do about the generator. I've got plenty of scrap and tools from Diamond City, I don't know all what I'll need, but I swear I can probably fix it. Six and seven...

"...that's still up in the air, one of them will be finding a doctor who can help Nora." Nate rapped his knuckles against the wood. Looking at Meathead, thoughts were running through Nate's head and a wave of confusion was coming off of him. Meathead tilted his head and hesitantly nodded. Piper noticed Nate's gaze and turned to her right to look at Meathead.

"What are you thinking about, Nate?" Piper asked.

"To break into the Institute...there was a time in False Pass when we needed to cross the Pass and get into the Chinese camp on the other side. We couldn't swim across, we couldn't take a boat across, we couldn't fly across and air drop someone, so we took ten suits of power armor, and walked across the bottom and came up on the other side."

"You were telling me about this Pass, where exactly is it?"

"About five hundred miles to the south west of Anchorage."

"So why did you need to get into the Chinese camp?"

"We knew from our intelligence sources, they were making a weapon. They were trying to build a machine that could stop our computers. Thinking about the Chinese, and their hundreds of thousands of people on the other side, while we only had a few thousand on our side...we only needed ten people to take this weapon."

"Sir, timer's going off." Codsworth mentioned.

"Thank you Codsworth."

"What were they going to use it for?"

Nate licked his lips and slowly pressed down the plunger to the french press, forcing all the spent coffee grounds to the bottom. "I don't know how much you know about the past, Piper. But in America and China, were were having a massive arms race. We developed tools of war to fight against the Chinese. While they were using enhanced stealth technology and stealth armor that made the wearer completely invisible, but if you looked hard, you could see the refraction of light around the edge of their bodies. Same with water, or snow, we could see the water hit them. We countered that with Stealth-Boys, but while theirs lasted a lot longer, ours ran out of power fairly quickly. In the end, we took away their tactical advantage regardless."

Pouring two cups of coffee, Nate cut open the cap to the honey jar, and scraped off bits of dried honey into his cup. "Honey?" Nate asked Piper, "It'll help with the bitterness."

She nodded and Nate cut off wedges of honey, dropping them into Piper's cup. Nate took a long gulp of his, shuddering as he remembered more and more about the past.

"The Chinese came into the war using the stealth armor, only they didn't know we built power armor."

"Okay. Yeah. So, you guys take back Anchorage?"

"We did, but the fighting didn't stop there. They wanted to plant their flag and call parts of Alaska their homeland, but we wouldn't allow it. We called for the entire expunging of all Chinese forces from all of Alaska. Usually at the end of wars, people try to claim this or that, but we were fighting for their unconditional surrender. Fuck those dishonest untrustworthy assholes. While power armor helped, it didn't..." Nate pounded his fist into his palms three times, making sure Piper heard the thump.

"It didn't scare them. So, they dropped all terrain tanks. These bastards were huge. They could go uphill, across snow, they could float, and they almost punched a hole across False Pass, but they could only get so many from the mainland China, to fucking nowhere, False Pass. It was a massive arms race, Piper. We were constantly trying to one-up the other side, while they tried to outdo us."

"It was the stretch of water that undid them. An impassible moat." Nate rubbed his face, trying to lay everything out for her.

"So, with all these forces fleeing, heading west on foot, or truck, or whatever that moved, they were picked at by our forces in Cold Bay, to the east of us, but they already had plans for Cold Bay. Our boys were going to pull out and bomb the airfield, make it impossible for planes to land. Everyone was already landing on the beaches. That's another thing they didn't have experience in. Our pilots were more experienced. They tried landing on beaches, and would crash, break their landing gear off, kill themselves on touchdown, lose all their supplies. Americans trained our pilots to fly in Alaskan weather, before allowing them to fly anywhere else in the world, because Alaskan weather is some of the most difficult, terrifying weather to fly in. We had the homefield advantage, Piper. We let nature work with us, not against us."

"Anyway, they used armor, we used armor. They used tanks, we brought in our own tank. It was a robot, a big robot. About forty feet tall, and we called it Liberty Prime."

"I actually have heard about that. There were stories coming from the south years ago in the Capitol Wasteland...the D.C. area. Where there was a huge battle, absolutely huge against two factions. The Brotherhood of Steel, and another group, the Enclave." Piper rolled her head around, trying to remember the details and shake out the clutter. "They were fighting over a water purifier and the Enclave took control of it from the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood came back with a giant robot, people I heard it from said it was fifty feet, a hundred feet, but this sounds like your robot, Liberty Prime. They deployed it against the Enclave."

"Okay, so you have some idea of what it could do. Liberty Prime carried M-28 tactical warheads, Piper. A whole stockpile's worth of explosives, and it would throw them like footballs. The entire gesture was designed and programmed by scientists because the main sport for America was football. We were absolutely crazy about football games. So, this giant robot, carrying explosives, could stomp on you, and out of its eyes shot a laser, not like the laser rifles, but imagine one hundred laser rifles all taped together, firing in one continuous beam. That is what we built."

"So America liked it's robots."

"Yes. After we reclaimed Anchorage, they started developing something to counter it immediately, well, actually. I don't know if it was immediately, or there was an intelligence leak along the way, but either way, in Alaska, the Chinese forces were working on a machine to stop Liberty Prime. It needed to be mobile, something they could carry onto the battlefield and use it against Liberty Prime. They built a weapon, only it wasn't a weapon, it was a computer that could hijack and hack any robot it was aimed at. Their mobile base was forced from Bristol Bay, and thats where we discovered they were working on this weapon. They retreated to False Pass after they knew that we took Anchorage. What they really wanted though, is Dutch Harbor. Dutch Harbor was half a day by boat away from us, but they needed to punch through False Pass and round Cape Lutke, then get past artillery on Scotch Cape and Cape Sarichef. Those were on the total opposite end of the island, and we were getting air drops from Dutch Harbor. No roads from False Pass to those capes, those guys were on their own. But, with a little determination and marching orders, you could feasibly get there on foot...or ATV." Nate said, sipping at his coffee now that it had cooled a few degrees.

Nate made an oval circle on the coffee table with his hands and pointed to imaginary points on the map.

"We were one of the dozens of things that stood in between the Chinese and Dutch Harbor. There was still the land and sea and air, but they were so desperate to take out our food supply for the lower forty eight, that they wanted it bad. They were attacking Dutch Harbor from all angles, and were sunk by our artillery from thirty miles away, because Unalaska Island, where Dutch Harbor is located, is all mountains that drop straight into the sea. It was a fortress, and once we were dug into Unalaska, there was no way in hell to get us out."

Nate took another drink of his coffee, and Piper did the same. She grimaced, then added more sugar and stirred it before trying it again.

"With the Chinese fleeing, their options were to take Dutch Harbor, as they had tried to do from the very beginning of the war, or start ferrying people out and away from Alaska. I'll give you one guess as to what five hundred thousand starving soldiers tried to do when they heard the biggest seafood depot in the world was only a day away."

"They went after you."

"Exactly. But they couldn't get to Dutch Harbor, without getting past False Pass." Nate scratched the top of his head, feeling the slight buzz of caffine. Piper listened intently as she took another sip.

"It would take Liberty Prime three weeks to reach False Pass. We'd already kept them at bay, but now with the report of a weapon that could take control of Liberty Prime or any robot they pointed it at in development in the Chinese hands, we knew that we would ultimately be fucked if they got it working."

Nate jabbed his head to the side, "Which they did."

Piper swallowed. "Every robot?" Exhaling through her nose.

"Yep. We knew they had it close by when all of our machines went haywire. We had about one hundred Mr. Gutzy's, but they killed plenty of American troops. We couldn't get a signal out, but we prepared for that eventuality. We told our people that if we lost contact with the outside, they were to assume they were in control of a signal jammer, and were using a device that could remotely hack into our equipment. We went old school on them and dropped an analogue telephone wire from False Pass, all the way to Dutch Harbor, right over the mountain and into the sea, so we always stayed in contact and told them all our robots started acting crazy. It was a long, long, long chord of telephone wire, but it worked. It became our number one priority to steal the computer from them while all of the American research and development technicians and scientists rewrote a better security system to protect our databases from being controlled by them."

"We were assigned to take on a stealth operation that involved us using power armor to walk across the bottom of the pass, and straight into their camp. Using Stealth Boys, we would have a total of half an hour to locate the weapon. We stole it along with all information they had on the weapon. Didn't matter if it was in encoded, written in Chinese, or not, we were to take everything and let the code breakers and translators deal with it. So we did."

"We thought we finally got the last leg up on them. But then...while they didn't know about Liberty Prime, we didn't know about them working on teleportation. I knew, but, I couldn't confirm it. You see, before I reached False Pass, my team and I witnessed a giant sea and air battle between the Chinese forces in the air, and the USS Olympia, Astoria, and Trinidad. We marched from Cold Bay to False Pass weeks before the Chinese were anywhere close to us, and we went along the beach, watching this battle take place. Our boats shot forty planes out of the sky when all of a sudden they were being lifted up into the air, like someone sculpted the perfect bubble around each ship, and POP!" Nate yelled.

"They all vanished. Their planes started crashing too, some glided along, some went off into the sea, most of them crashed. But there were a dozen Chinese planes that we saw crash around us, one of them had two living Chinese soldiers, and a unicorn pony in it. They were all speaking Chinese."

"Wait, a unicorn? No way." Piper said.

Nate bit his cheek and reached into his backpack again. "Let me show you."

"No way." Piper said again.

Pulling out the glass mason jar with the unicorn's horn in front of her, she looked at it from all angles. Tilting her head and looking up at Nate.

"We had allies and enemies we didn't even know we were fighting. But, from the time of the war for Alaska and today are two completely different worlds. We didn't know that who was backing us, and we didn't know they had enemies either. Have you ever heard the expression, the enemy of my enemy is my friend?"

Nate asked, keeping his eyes on Piper and not looking at Meathead. "No," She replied.

"It means that both parties have a common interest. After the planes crashed on the beach, we went through the wreckage and found two chinese soldiers and a unicorn fighting two changelings. The unicorn could use it's horn to channel energy to lift things up, to teleport, a whole slew of mind-boggling things, but we killed the three of them after they shot at the changelings. One died, and the other told us they were on our side."

"What do you mean? What did changelings look like?"

"I'll show you," Nate said, "Time to go check the Vault."

\111/

After they finished their coffee, Nate showed Piper out the front door and down the street, leading down a worn path that lead behind Sanctuary Hills up the trail to Vault 111.

"The thing about changelings, Piper, is that they want to help people. One's been helping me for a long time now, from the moment I stepped out of the vault. While as the Chinese had stealth, tanks, and Mr. Robot, when we had power armor, Liberty Prime, and the home field advantage, they were eventually going to acclimate and adapt to the cold, and use spies and teleportation against us. Changelings took away that advantage." Nate told Piper, "Go stand on the platform. I'll send the elevator down."

"How did changelings stop them?" Piper asked. Nate went inside the control booth and pressed the red button, making the yellow cage lights spin as the elevator slowly descended.

"They warned us."

"What's a changeling look like?" Piper asked Nate as he stepped onto the platform.

Glancing down at Meathead, Nate hid the small gesture and looked outwards at the horizon as they descended.

"He can show you himself."

The elevator shaft was over their heads, and shadows crawled down towards them as the late afternoon sun couldn't be seen from so far down the more they descended.

Then finally, a pair of doors slid shut over the top of the elevator shaft, suspending them in momentary darkness.

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