Sunset wrinkled her nose as she surveyed the yard full of mud, brackish blood, and churned-up slush. The Germantown Police HQ was a mess in every sense of the word. Everyone was eager to get the hell away from the place, but they all agreed to stay just long enough for Twilight to fix Rainbow’s hearing aids. There was no point in abandoning the advantage of cover until they were fully prepared. As Twilight worked, the Rainbooms discussed what to do next.

The priority was getting Ashleigh back to the Regulator HQ. Fluttershy had done what she could, and it turned out that Red had some medical knowledge which had kept her stable during their incarceration, but the woman needed proper medical care in a facility equipped for it. On top of that, neither Red nor Shorty were really fit enough to make the trek across the wastes to their home on their own, even with weapons scavenged from the dead Super Mutants.

In the end, it was decided that Rainbow would deliver Ashleigh to the Regulator HQ at top speed, while the others escorted Red and Shorty to Big Town. If the Regulators didn’t have the proper equipment or expertise to treat Ashleigh, then Rainbow would drop her to Megaton instead before joining the others. As for Uncle Leo, he was content to simply tag along with the Rainbooms for a while.

“You’re sure you’ll be able to find Big Town?” Sunset asked once Rainbow’s hearing was fixed.

“You literally just saw Red help me mark it on my Pip-Boy,” Rainbow replied flatly. “I’m not Adam, I know how to read a fucking map.”

Sunset shrugged and turned away with a smirk. “Hey, in my defense, I didn’t even know you could read, so…”

“Oh, screw you,” Rainbow shot as the others chuckled. “Hurry up and hand me Applejack 2.0 so I can get the hell out of here.”

As soon as Rainbow had left with Ashleigh, under strict orders to keep an eye out in case the Talon Company speedster was around, the rest of the group took the opportunity to find a relatively clean building where they could have a quick meal. Red and Shorty both devoured everything that was put in front of them. The Super Mutants clearly hadn’t been very attentive when it came to feeding their captives. Fluttershy quietly ensured that the pair didn’t get too much food and accidentally overload their stomachs.

“So, Big Town.” Everyone looked up from their food as Rarity spoke. “I’ve heard of it in passing, but I must admit that I know little besides the name. Is it a large settlement?”

Shorty let out a bitter laugh, earning himself a reproachful look from Red. “It’s built for a larger population than it has,” Red admitted.

“It’d be bigger if the fucking Super Mutants and slavers would leave us alone,” Shorty spat.

“Y’all get regular raids?” Applejack asked.

“All the damned time,” Red replied. “We’re lucky if we get more than three or four days in a row without seeing a raiding party from one or the other, although I guess we might get a break from the Muties for a while now that you’ve trashed this outpost. Sometimes we manage to fight them off without losing anyone, sometimes we don’t. It wouldn’t be so bad if we had some real way of defending ourselves, but we’ve got nothing.”

Sunset raised a curious eyebrow. “What sort of protection does the place have? Megaton has its massive walls, Rivet City and Arefu can only be accessed by bridges, what about Big Town?”

Shorty shook his head and said bitterly, “We’ve got nothing but crappy fences around a few buildings in the middle of nowhere. Those bastards back at Little Lamplight lied to us.”

“They probably just didn’t know,” Red countered gently.

Sunset opened her mouth to ask what the hell Little Lamplight had to do with anything, when Twilight gasped in recognition. “So Big Town is where Little Lamplighters are sent when they reach sixteen?”

Red and Shorty both nodded grimly. “Yeah, unfortunately,” Red said.

“They insist that it’s safe, but it’s about as far from safe as you can get,” Shorty added.

Their words presented Sunset with a dilemma. The Rainbooms, Applejack especially, needed to get back to the Regulator HQ, but abandoning Big Town when it was clearly in dire straits just didn’t sit right with her. Sunset glanced around at the rest of the Rainbooms, only to notice that they were all staring at her expectantly. She allowed herself a brief smile at the thought that they had all come to the same conclusion. “I can’t promise anything, but we’ll see what we’ve got to work with when we get to Big Town and see what we can do to help.”

The two former captives immediately perked up and started thanking the Rainbooms profusely, but Sunset only paid it half a mind as she gathered up her gear. Once everyone was ready, she checked their orientation with her Pip-Boy one last time, then the group set off near enough due south.

Crossing the wastes was even slower going, now that the girls had a pair of mistreated captives to escort. Rarity and Twilight once again took up the responsibility of clearing a path through the snow, stoically answering a tide of questions from Red and Shorty while the others kept a careful eye on their surroundings. At least their curiosity was keeping them distracted from the cold.

Thankfully, the snow was keeping the wasteland as deserted as ever. At one point, the group discovered another Super Mutant outpost in an old church, but they didn’t have any trouble getting past it without being seen.

A short distance beyond the church, the girls found themselves in unpleasantly familiar territory. A river lay before them, deeper than they remembered, with a sturdy concrete bridge over it and a handful of ramshackle buildings on its near bank.

Thick snow made things look a little different to the last time the girls had passed this way, but none of them could fail to recognize the place where they had first properly fought Blades and his cronies. To her surprise, Sunset found that, rather than regret or dismay, she felt little more than a dulled sense of acknowledgement that bad things had happened here. She assumed it was due to her meds. Even so, Sunset couldn’t repress a shiver as she passed the rocks where she had got her first kills. Even Red and Shorty seemed to pick up on the somber mood, as they stopped asking questions entirely even after the group had crossed over the bridge and left the ill-fated area behind.

Pressing on, the Rainbooms were surprised when, only a short while later, Red suddenly exclaimed, “There it is, Big Town!” Sunset looked ahead and spotted a tightly-packed collection of battered old buildings. She almost felt guilty as she realized that the Rainbooms had marched past this place a couple of times and never noticed that it was a settlement. “We’ll have to go around the town fence so Dusty can let us in,” Red told them. “This way.”

The others followed as Red directed them through the dilapidated remnants of suburbia until they found the fence she had mentioned. Sunset ran a critical eye over it as they walked. The construction was surprisingly solid, largely composed of thick wooden panels and sheets of corrugated metal with the odd burnt-out car shell providing a buttress. Fortification clearly wasn’t that much of an issue.

As the group rounded one last corner, they spotted a rope bridge leading into the settlement proper. Sunset assumed that it crossed a ditch or moat of some sort, but it was impossible to tell thanks to all of the snow. A guard was sitting at the far end of the bridge, wearing dirty leather armor and a dented police helmet. The fact that all of the Rainbooms clocked him before he had even noticed them gave Sunset a good idea of why Big Town was really having trouble with attackers.

Several seconds too late, the guard finally noticed the group. His eyes practically popped out of his skull as he scrambled to his feet. “What the- aren’t you the Rainbo-oh, shit!”

He reached for his weapon, but Twilight yanked it out of his grasp with her magic before he could even point it anywhere near them. “Uncle Leo is with us. Don’t try that again,” she said coolly, before thrusting the rifle back into his hands.

“I-it’s okay, Dusty! The Rainbooms rescued us!” Red called out. “This Mutant is friendly!”

“Meta Human,” Rarity corrected, earning a confused look from the former captives.

Dusty looked down at his gun, back at the group, then back down at the gun again. Finally, he shrugged and slung it back over his shoulder. “Sorry about that. I didn’t think you girls were actually real. Uh, come on through.”

Pinkie cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. “Is he on jet or something?”

“No, you’re just something of a myth around here,” Red told her as they crossed the bridge. “I mean, we hear about you on the radio all the time, but we figured that you were just something that Three Dog cooked up to try and give people hope, like Daring Dashwood.”

Sunset looked around as the group walked through the settlement. People were stopping and staring at the girls and Uncle Leo with wide eyes, which was normal, but everyone around was shockingly young. None of the residents were more than a year or two older than the Rainbooms, and several of them were clearly younger.

On top of that, the buildings inside the fence were almost as neglected as the ones outside: All of them bearing bullet holes, scorch marks, and deep gouges from melee weapons, while only a few of them had even the most rudimentary of patch jobs. Even the paths were still packed with snow where no-one had bothered to clear it away. These people needed help.

With a sigh, Sunset slung her plasma rifle over her shoulder and turned to Red. “What sort of arsenal does Big Town have? Do you have many weapons?”

Red blinked in surprise. “Not really. We’ve got enough for most of us to have a gun each, but that’s about it” She scratched her head as she thought. “There are a couple of old robots in the scrapyard, but none of us have any idea how to fix them.”

“That’ll do,” Sunset said with a curt nod. “Gather everyone in town, we’re going to teach you all how to defend yourselves properly.” Red and Shorty both glanced at her in surprise before running off to obey. As soon as they were gone, Sunset pointed at a young woman nearby wearing scraggly black clothes and white make-up all over her face. “You, what’s your name?”

“Me? I’m Bittercup,” the goth girl replied, looking nervous at being addressed.

“Is anyone in town injured?” Sunset asked.

Bittercup gripped her one arm and pulled a forlorn expression. “Timebomb is still in a coma in the clinic. He’s probably going to slip away any time now.”

“That’s one hell of a name,” Sunset muttered. “Okay, Fluttershy, go and see what you can do for Timebomb. Twilight, AJ, see if you can fix those robots. Rarity, I want you and Uncle Leo to relieve Dusty and send him to me. Me and Pinkie are going to teach these people how to defend themselves and look after this place properly.”

As soon as the Big Town residents were gathered, all of them looking confused and a little scared, Sunset set about seeing what they were capable of. Two who turned out to have a slight knack for tinkering were sent to help Twilight and Applejack. The rest, unfortunately, had had jobs back in Little Lamplight that didn’t translate well to defending a town, such as farming cave fungus or filtering potable water from stalactite condensation. Only Dusty actually had experience of infiltrating Vault 87, but even he had never actually had to fire a gun before leaving for Big Town. All of their decent fighters had either been killed or taken by slavers and Super Mutants.

First of all came gun handling. It was clear from the get-go that none of the residents had any real training with a weapon, and even the benefit of experience didn’t stop Dusty from nearly blowing his own foot off accidentally when Sunset asked him to draw his gun.

When Sunset was fairly confident that the residents knew how to handle their guns, or at least not accidentally shoot each other with them, she started running them through some basic tactics and teaching them how to look after their defenses. While she was overseeing them, Sunset was surprised to hear a voice crackle through her Pip-Boy’s speaker, “Hey, Sunshim, you all good?”

“We’re good, Rainbow,” Sunset replied, gesturing to the residents to keep practicing on their own. “I thought our signal strength wasn’t strong enough to reach here from the Regulator HQ, are you on your way back?”

“Nah, turns out there’s a Vertibird out here. They’re boosting the signal through their own radio,” Rainbow explained.

“A Vertibird?” Sunset repeated curiously. “Are they delivering water or something?”

“Yeah, to some place called the Republic of Dave,” Rainbow confirmed. “They were supposed to have headed back to Project Purity by now, but apparently they got sidetracked when they found an old robobrain from, get this, Vault 112.”

That was a surprise to Sunset. “Isn’t that where Adam and James had to deal with some mad scientist in a simulation? What the hell is it doing way out here?”

“Maybe they left the door open?” Rainbow suggested.

Sunset certainly hoped that that was the case. “Whatever it is, we’ll let the Enclave handle it. We’ve got bigger things to worry about than a stray robobrain.”

Shephard was annoyed. So far, the day had been a complete clusterfuck.

First, the cretins stationed in the Mall had captured what they thought was a Rainboom and sent it back to Vault 87. It had taken Shephard all of thirty seconds to deduce that the girl wasn’t a Rainboom. Admittedly, she was from the same place as wherever the other girls came from, but she wasn’t one of their kind, and, more importantly, she didn’t have a Geode, making her effectively useless for Shephard’s purposes.

As if the ineptitude of minions wasn’t bad enough, a squad of winged scouts had just returned to the Vault with the news that the Rainbooms had single-handedly wiped out the Germantown outpost and its entire garrison.

“Should we send more troops to Germ’ntown?” The scout asked.

Shephard thought about it, but decided against it. “No, there’s no point. The Rainbooms will just destroy them again.”

“Maybe, but then we can steal their sparklies?” The scout suggested hopefully.

“They are too powerful, we’ll have to give up on that for now.” Shephard ignored the scout’s muttered apologies and considered how to proceed. The Enclave were still the main threat to Super Mutant supremacy in the Capital Wasteland, but the Rainbooms were more dangerous than expected, enough so that allowing them free reign was no longer an option. Then again, neither stealing their Geodes nor just outright destroying them wasn’t going to be easy either.

Shephard frowned and looked over at the new captive. Sonata Dusk was cowering in the corner of the room with her hands tied behind her back, curled up and trying to make herself as small as possible. Almost every patch of visible skin was covered in fresh bruises. Shephard had been intending to just pump her full of FEV with the other captives but, with just a small sacrifice, there was a chance that Sonata could prove to be much more useful. Jabsco would certainly be against this plan if he knew about it, but then, he didn’t really need to be told the details. Not the real ones, anyway.

“Cut off the head, and the body dies,” Shephard mumbled with a grin.

Sorry for the delay, took me a little while to make sure there weren't any loose ends when I altered the original plan. Also, apologies to zsewqthewolf (if you're still reading) for not going with your suggestion for Big Town, but I've been working to streamline this section so it doesn't start feeling like filler episodes.

Thanks for reading!