Both Joseph and I were silent as we crossed the large cleared area on which the HQ and Barracks stood. As we walked, both of us kept a close eye on the vague entrances to the large area, worried about who might see us and who might come to investigate. Despite the exposed feeling I got any time I stepped outside the HQ. I already felt a bit lighter. The weight of my task, of our very survival, seemed a bit lighter now that I had another fighter by my side. Someone who, for all intents and purposes, should be better at all of this than me.

  As we got closer, both of us wordlessly picked up the pace, with the same feeling you get walking up the stairs after having already turned out the lights. When we finally pushed inside the HQ, and I latched the door behind us, Maxwell approached from down the hall.

  "Maxwell, this is Joseph," I said with a waving gesture. "Joseph, Maxwell."

  They both nodded to each other and followed as I made my way back to the main hall. I picked a table at random and sat down heavily, gesturing for Maxwell and Joseph to both take seats. Once they had sat, I leaned forward, looking between the both of them.

  "So. Joseph… Tell me about yourself," I said, watching him closely. "Like I said, you're the first soldier I've summoned, so I have very little in the way of details when it comes to how this works. I know you're alive, with a soul and everything, but beyond that…"

  "Well, s- Carson. I don't have much to tell you. I know I'm the equivalent to a basic soldier from a generalized army, not too different from what you would expect from the United States Army," He explained. "I have the knowledge, endurance, and training one might expect from that position."

  "What about experience?" I asked. "I'm as green as you can expect, and having two of us like that would make things difficult."

  "While I do not have literal experience, my body and mind have been conditioned to a certain degree," He explained, scratching the back of his head. "If I'm honest, Sir, I don't quite know how it works, but you don't have to worry about me panicking and getting us into trouble."

  "And what about things like personality? Your preferences?"

  "When we are first created, from what I understand, we are given one of several prepackaged general personalities," He explained simply, his face actually going a bit slack. "However, the longer we exist, the more that our soul will shine through. I will likely become more unique as time goes on. That, plus the allowed variances in genetics and physical makeup, guarantees that our personal preferences are varied. I just have to find what I like."

  "Interesting… well, as I said, since you are the first, we are going to be worrying together directly a lot," I explained with a shrug. "I have a feeling we will be getting to know each other pretty well. If there is anything you think I should know, just speak up."

  "I am at your service, Sir,"

  "Connor," I repeated. "Call me Connor."

  He nodded, and I leaned back, letting out a long breath. I looked over at Maxwell, who had been listening silently.

  "Anything to add?" I asked, gesturing to all three of us. "You're in the same boat as him. Anything you want to say? Anything you skipped over before?"

  "Not that I can think of."

  "Right. Well, for now, I think we need to get back to work,"

  "Will you be taking a quest?" Maxwell asked, standing up as I did, Joseph following suit.

  "No, I want to make sure that we fill up whatever metric or scale they are using to determine that I have interacted with this world enough," I said, gesturing vaguely through a nearby window. "I don't want another quest set here."

  "They do happen naturally, sir," Maxwell pointed out. "no matter how much time you spend here."

  "Yes, but you said rarely," I responded, looking back at him.

  "They are, at least by what I was told," He confirmed.

  "Good," I finished, looking back at Joseph. "C'mon, let's get you a bedroom, I need to grab some ammo from mine."

  I lead him to the bedroom wing, letting him pick a room before going into mine and grabbing some ammo. I had barely enough to refill all of my rifle mags but plenty to fill my empty pistol. When I stepped out of my room, I found Joseph waiting.

  "Suit up, we are going to be moving some stuff from one of the buildings I just cleared over to here," I explained. "A couple of cabinets, some shelves, and some metal crates for storage. After that, we can call it a day."

  "Yes s- Connor," he said, turning back and heading into his room while I made my way back to the main hall.

  About fifteen minutes later, we were making our way to the office buildings, where we quickly found several metal two, a few metal, as well as two, a, and several boxes. As we moved stuff over, Maxwell wiped down and stored things away, making it as neat as he could. When we were done two hours later, we had a good amount of space to store miscellaneous stuff we found, primarily for sale in case a scavenger came by.

  When we were done, we settled down for an early dinner so that we could get up bright and early the next morning and beat the heat of the sun. Now that I had some backup, I felt significantly more confident in working around the immediate area, as well as our remaining quests.

  We had been eating for a few minutes when Joseph paused for a moment, mentally considering something before finally speaking his mind.

  "Connor… could I ask what your plan is?" Joseph asked, the soldier slowly opening his water.

  "Well… honestly, at the moment, there isn't much planning we can do," I admitted with a frown. "In the short term, we have two quests to kill Grazers and Striders over in the Horizon world, as well as an exploration quest. The two kill quests are minor improvements to our kit, a combat knife, and a flashlight, respectively, while the exploration quest would give us unmarked maps of both the area around here and of the Horizon world. I want them, obviously, but they can wait if we get something better."

  "What about long-term?"

  "Well… unfortunately, the way I see it, we are kind of beholden to the RNG of our quests at this point," I responded, shaking my head a little. "I have things that I want, like keeping the place self-sufficient and defensible so we can fight off threats like raiders, ghoul hordes, and super mutants, but I have no way of just making that happen, especially not without the proper manpower. If we had more people, we could start dragging concrete chunks around to make some basic barriers. Or, we could see about making a ladder up to the roof or the top of one of the office buildings to give us an early warning for incoming threats… but that's not really in the cards until things change."

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  "What about the locals?" Joseph asked, draining his bottle of water. "Would they help?"

  "If we could pay them, sure," I said with a frown. "But I have no way of… paying… them…"

  My frown faded as memories started flashing in my head, memories of playing the game. I knew my foreknowledge would come in handy, but I hadn't really sat down and thought about just how I could use it to my advantage.

  Now, thinking about it, it seemed kind of stupid for me not to realize it sooner.

  If I was looking for money, there were plenty of places I could likely find a lot of loot, enough that selling it might actually be the hard part. Even better, since this world was specifically not scaled to a video game, it was pretty likely that any cache of loot wouldn't be limited by game mechanics. I highly doubted that an armory would consist of a single room filled with weapons, at least not in the real world.

  "Okay… there are a few ways we could make that many caps," I admitted. "There are a few armories spread around, two of which are relatively nearby, and a few other places that have things we could gather and sell. It's enough that selling it all might actually end up being the issue. The problem is we are far from ready for any of that."

  "What's stopping us?" Joseph asked, more curious than combative.

  "Numbers, for one thing," I pointed out. "Not only do we need more hands to help, but we are way outnumbered, Joseph, by just about every group out there right now. You saw how many ghouls I had to kill for a small little office space. Imagine how many we would find walking into a building five times that size. Imagine how many walk the streets of the city. Imagine how many are in the subway systems, just waiting to burst out if they are disturbed."

  The soldier's eyes went wide, his face paling slightly. He nodded rapidly after a moment, almost collapsing back into his chair.

  "Okay, yeah, fair enough."

  "Worse, that pattern continues everywhere. Every raider group will be in the dozens, not just a few drugged-out psychos," I explained before nodding my head to Maxwell. "According to Maxwell, at least."

  "I'm afraid that knowledge comes directly to the entity responsible for this," Maxwell responded. "If it proves false, it has nothing to do with me."

  I snorted and shook my head, running my hand through my hair, before leaning on the table.

  "The plan is to build ourselves up a bit, first so we can properly defend ourselves, and second, until we have the resources to push out from here," I explained. "I want a way to move around faster, since this place is clearly more spread out than the game. We won't be able to just casually walk across DC, especially not if we are carrying a few tons of loot. But again, we are locked into the RNG of the quests. If the entities are kind, we may be ready to start looking for allies and loot in a week, or we might be stuck here for a month before even finding another opportunity to unlock a soldier."

  "Once we have enough people, what's your plan then?"

  "Assuming RNG doesn't solve the problem by chance, I want to make contact with our neighbors," I explained with a nod. "Your idea of hiring the locals to help with labor is a good one, and Megaton is just across the river. However, in order to get there, I want us strong enough to take on the raiders that live in Super Dupermart, which is vaguely on the path there."

  "So the short term is to keep doing quests, and the long term is to hope we unlock what we need to start reaching out," Joseph confirmed, and I nodded in agreement. "That seems... awfully passive."

  "I know, but there isn't much we can do about it. We will explore around here a bit to keep more quests from triggering here as well," I said. "Probably one quest and one short patrol per day…?"

  "Why are you so desperate to keep quests from triggering here?"

  "Because the consequences for messing up here are astronomically more severe," I pointed out. "If we fuck up in the Horizon world, attract way too much attention, or maybe piss off a tribe, if there are even any around us, then all we have to do is run through the dark door and wait a few weeks for everything to blow over. Hell, after yesterday, we even have a way to check if the immediate danger around the link site has passed."

  I took a sip of my water, ignoring the already rising craving for something else besides the strong flavor packet and bland food. Already, the barely passable food was becoming annoying.

  "But, if we attract a hoard here, piss off a raider group, or somehow get sniffed out by a super mutant party, we have nowhere to retreat to," I pointed out, gesturing to the building around us. "We would have to fight them off ourselves, with whatever forces we could muster. Sure, we could run and leave this place behind, but then we would lose the only thing giving us an advantage powerful enough to survive and, maybe, make a difference."

  "But... given enough time and work… is there anything here we can't beat?" Joseph asked, and I shook my head.

  "Yes. There are several surviving nuclear ICBMs around the country. If we piss off the wrong people, we may wake up to a second sun on our front lawn," I responded with a shrug. "Between that and several other WMD and long-range weapons, we are not, and will likely never be, truly invincible. Thankfully, those kinds of threats would only come after us if we seriously start to piss people off. And who knows, maybe we eventually unlock a missile defense system like House has for New Vegas."

  There was also possibly an alien ship floating somewhere in orbit right at that moment, with a massive death ray laser pointed down at us, but I kept that to myself. I was barely handling it, and there was no reason to burden them with that knowledge, especially when there was nothing we could do about it.

  We could cross that bridge when it tried to abduct us or whatever.

  Once we were done with dinner, we said goodnight and headed to our rooms. It was relatively early, but between clearing out the buildings and then hauling stuff from them to the HQ, I was exhausted. Besides, with how warm the last few days had been, working in the morning was a much smarter bet than working in the afternoon, when the sun had plenty of time to heat everything up.

  Predictably, we woke up pretty early the next morning, and together, Joseph and I quickly got ready. Once we were armored up, we both grabbed our weapons and did a quick inspection of each, before leaving the comfort of the HQ behind. The day before, I had cleared the buildings to the west of the main hall. Today, mainly to satisfy the entities but also to clear any dangers from our doorstep, Joseph and I would carefully clear the building directly to the east. It was actually closer to the HQ than the buildings I cleared the day before, but it was also significantly larger.

  Slowly but surely, we made our way from the HQ to the eastern building, which we easily spotted had at least partially collapsed. The top two floors were nothing but rubble, with most of the concrete and debris sliding off to the ground around the base. It completely sealed off the entrances, but luckily also stacked high enough that we could easily climb to a window on the second floor. After a look around, I climbed up and smashed through the glass with the butt of my rifle. Once I had cleared out all of the dangerous shards, I peeked my head in, seeing nothing but the dark interior of a hallway. After looking back at Joseph, who was at the base of the concrete pile, I aimed my gun down the hall and fired off a single shot.

  Even as the sound of the shot echoed, I was climbing and sliding down the pile, stopping on the opposite side of it as Joseph. There we waited, eyes and ears peeled for any sign of threats. For a good few minutes, we stood there, waiting until we were entirely sure nothing was coming. After that, we climbed back up together, carefully stepping into the building. After confirming that the roof wasn't about to come down on top of us, we started clearing the building properly, both looking for anything dangerous and anything valuable.

  It wasn't until we got to the basement that we encountered anything dangerous in the form of a small hive of radroaches. Unlike the two I killed on my own, this was a group of seven, with a few dozen smaller ones running around them. Thankfully, we were able to work together, with Joseph shooting the larger ones while I stomped and smacked any of the smaller ones that tried to charge us.

  "Fuck, Connor… these things smell horrific," Joseph said after we finished killing the whole group. "How do they smell worse than the ghouls? Those were literally walking corpses!"

  "I don't know, but I have a feeling that we are never going to stop having to deal with them," I said, shaking my head. "C'mon, let's do a sweep for anything useful, then get the hell out of here. The sooner we finish here, the sooner we can visit the Horizon world. It actually smells good there.”

  Joseph nodded, and together, we scanned through the basement, moving once we were sure it was clear. About an hour later, we had finished scanning the other three surviving floors. After that, we headed back to the HQ, with plans to loot the building properly if we had time later, or perhaps the following day.