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She gave a tired smile. Then she climbed on the bike, the engine purred low and steady, and with one last nod, she tore off into the night, her coat snapping behind her like a war banner caught in the wind.
Then the scene change to Madison Li who now felt wind coming off the ruined Charles River cut like rusted knives as Madison Li steered the bike along the ridge line just east of the airport ruins. The Prydwen loomed in the distance like a sleeping giant, suspended above the skeletal remains of Logan International, its floodlights casting long shadows over broken tarmac and skeletal aircraft husks. She could feel its presence even before she saw it — that low, ever-present thrum of vertibird engines and the dull hum of fusion generators feeding the Brotherhood war machine. There was no mistaking it. No forgetting it.
She kept her speed steady, riding the exact line Sico had instructed. A hair to the left, and she'd trigger their early detection net. A hair to the right, and they'd label her an approaching enemy. Precision mattered. And not just in coordinates.
As the outer perimeter came into view, she slowed, tires crunching over shattered concrete and drifted snow. A pair of Brotherhood sentries flanked the checkpoint — a makeshift barricade of scavenged steel and sandbags, set between two collapsed fuselages. One of them raised a gauntleted hand, the other shouldering his laser rifle with trained, automatic focus.
"Halt!" the one on the left barked. His voice cracked through the mask of his helmet, metallic and sharp. "Identify yourself!"
Madison killed the engine and let the silence settle. The stillness felt surreal after the roar of the ride. She dismounted slowly, her every movement deliberate — calm, practiced, no sudden gestures. These weren't the same green-eyed Brotherhood boys she'd known back in D.C. These were the hardened sons of Maxson's war — conditioned for suspicion, raised in fire.
She pulled back the hood of her coat, letting them see her face.
"I'm Dr. Madison Li," she said. Her voice didn't waver. "Tell Elder Maxson that I'm here to see him."
There was a beat of silence — just long enough to recognize that both Knights had clearly heard the name before. The one on the right lowered his rifle slightly, not relaxed, but visibly thrown. The other narrowed his eyes behind his visor.
"Repeat that?" he asked, almost uncertain.
"You heard me," Madison said, folding her arms. "I'm not here to fight. I'm here to speak with Maxson. And you're going to want to be the men who didn't shoot me before that happened."
The Knights exchanged a glance. One of them pressed a hand to the side of his helmet, likely activating his comm relay. Madison stood still, letting the cold settle into her bones. She didn't ask for warmth. She didn't ask to come inside. This was part of it. The ritual of suspicion. The gauntlet of fire before the trial.
"She says she's Madison Li," the Knight was murmuring into his comms. "Yes. That Madison Li… Understood."
Several tense minutes passed before the Knight turned back toward her, his rifle lowered but still across his chest like a warning.
"Orders are to escort you inside," he said. "Don't try anything. You'll be watched."
"Wouldn't expect anything less," she replied.
They led her through the checkpoint, past lines of power-armored soldiers patrolling the airport tarmac and perimeter towers. Every single set of eyes followed her. No one here forgot names like hers. She was a ghost from the prewar dreams of conquest. A brain behind the machine they all worshipped. And a traitor, depending on who you asked.
They took her up through a fortified terminal, where sandbagged nests faced out toward the sea and Brotherhood scribes worked by dim lighting, cataloging weapon caches and salvaged data cores. The place reeked of discipline. Of firepower. Of purpose bred from paranoia. Madison walked among them like a shadow already written into their history, her boots echoing on cracked tile.
When they reached the vertibird landing pad, another squad was waiting. This one wore T-60 power armor etched with red insignia — the Elder's detail. She said nothing as they motioned her into the transport. The craft lifted seconds after the doors sealed shut, buffeted by coastal winds. Below, the Commonwealth shrank into grey ruin. Above, the Prydwen waited.
Inside the vertibird, Madison stared out the window in silence, one hand braced on the side rail. No one spoke to her. No one needed to. The air said everything.
The deck of the Prydwen was exactly as she remembered — an iron leviathan carved in the image of militarized order. The command bay stood ahead, lit in harsh overhead lights, buzzing with activity. Paladins, scribes, and Knights moved like coordinated ants, each motion precise, dictated by rank and duty.
When she stepped onto the platform, flanked by her escort, every conversation paused. Heads turned. There was no official announcement, no sirens or alarms. But Madison Li's presence was a disturbance in the machine.
A familiar voice cut through the silence.
"Stand down. She's under my authority."
The others obeyed, scattering back to their posts with trained discipline. The one who spoke descended the central stairway from the command bridge — tall, broad-shouldered, his presence cutting a clear line through the tension like a drawn sword.
Elder Arthur Maxson.
He looked older than she remembered — not in years, but in gravity. War had carved him into something sharper, something more absolute. His battle coat swayed slightly with each step, and the lion-head clasp at his collar gleamed under the lights.
"Dr. Li," he said, stopping a few feet from her. His voice was firm, but not hostile. "You're either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid."
"I've been both," Madison replied evenly.
Maxson studied her for a long moment. "And now?"
She met his gaze, her eyes steady. "Now I'm practical. I'm here because we both want the same thing."
"That's a bold assumption."
"It's also true."
Another beat of silence stretched between them, but Maxson didn't order her detained. Instead, he gave a curt nod and gestured toward the upper command deck.
"Walk with me."
They crossed the war room slowly, under the watchful eyes of personnel who had long been told Madison Li was either a traitor or a cautionary tale. She ignored their stares.
Inside the Elder's private quarters — a repurposed officer's chamber turned into a hybrid strategy and research bay — Maxson gestured for her to sit. She did. He remained standing, back straight, eyes like stone.
"So," he began. "Let's get to it. You defected. You fled the Brotherhood, ran to the Institute. Helped them continue work on synthetic infiltration. Now, you return. Why?"
"Because they betrayed everything I believed in," Madison said. "I joined the Institute to escape the Brotherhood's authoritarianism. I thought I'd found people who believed in science for the sake of progress. But they're worse. Colder. Detached. They see the world as a problem to be replaced, not fixed."
"And what makes you think I care about your regret?" Maxson asked, not with anger, but calculation.
"Because you need me," she replied. "You need someone who understands the Institute's systems. Their command architecture. Their fallback contingencies. And — most of all — you need someone who knows how to build back Liberty Prime. Not just how to pilot him. How to control him."
That caught his attention.
He didn't react right away, but she saw it — the stillness, the narrowed eyes. The silent calculation.
"I designed the neural coordination arrays," she said. "The Institute couldn't replicate it. That's why they never build their own Prime. They stole my notes — but they never understood them. You have the platform. You have the frame. But without me, you'll never unlock its full potential."
Maxson folded his arms, staring down at her. "You want us to believe you've come back… to help us build back Liberty Prime."
"No," Madison said. "I've come back to make sure you use him for the right reasons."
Maxson's jaw tensed, a slight motion. Then he paced once, hands clasped behind his back.
"And what do you think the right reasons are, Dr. Li?"
"Not genocide," she replied. "Not scorched-earth crusades in the name of purity. Prime wasn't built to wipe out civilizations. He was built to protect humanity. That's what I'm here to ensure."
"And you think you have that authority?"
She rose from the chair, facing him eye to eye. "No. I have the knowledge. And right now, that's more valuable to you than any squad of Paladins or vertibird fleet. I'm not asking for forgiveness. I'm offering you a chance. One you won't get again."
Silence again. Maxson studied her as if he were staring through her — through years of betrayal, war, memory, legacy.
Then, finally, he nodded.
"You'll be under constant supervision," he said. "You'll answer directly to me. And if I even suspect deception…"
"You'll throw me off the deck," Madison said. "I know. I'd do the same."
He gave the faintest hint of a smile — not amusement, but acknowledgement. Mutual understanding.
"Welcome aboard, Dr. Li," Maxson said. "Let's see what Liberty Prime makes of you."
Maxson turned toward the command console and keyed a brief sequence. A soft chime followed, then a voice answered over the deck's internal comms: crisp, clipped, and unmistakably familiar.
"This is Ingram."
"Proctor," Maxson said, his tone still cool, but threaded with something firmer now — not quite urgency, not quite command. "Report to my quarters. Bring a secure escort. I'm assigning you a project."
There was a pause on the other end. Then, "Understood. On my way."
He turned back to Madison, his expression unchanged. "You'll work with Ingram. She's in charge of our technical divisions. You report to her unless I say otherwise. If she gives you an order, you follow it. Understood?"
Madison gave a quiet nod. "Understood."
Moments later, heavy bootfalls echoed from outside the door. The bulkhead slid open with a hiss, and Proctor Ingram stepped inside, a servo-assisted exoskeleton clanking softly around her legs and spine. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, a pair of welding goggles resting atop her head. Behind her trailed two Knights in Brotherhood fatigues, sidearms holstered but hands resting near them — a silent reminder of the suspicion that clung to every moment of this arrangement.
Ingram came to a stop just inside the chamber, her eyes locking onto Madison like a missile targeting system. The tension in the room thickened.
"Well, well," Ingram said, her voice a gravelly blend of surprise and steel. "Didn't expect to see your face on this bird again. Thought you traded in power armor for lab coats and isolation chambers."
"I never stopped building," Madison said calmly. "Just had to build for the wrong people for a while."
Ingram's brow twitched — the closest she came to a scowl — but she looked to Maxson for confirmation.
"She's with us, for now," Maxson said. "Take her down to the Boston Airport. Show her where we've stored the Liberty Prime components. You'll oversee her access. She doesn't move without your clearance."
Ingram crossed her arms. "You sure about this, Elder? You remember what she did."
"I remember exactly what she did," Maxson said. "I also remember she's the only one alive who understands every level of Prime's neural interface." He took a step closer to the Proctor. "The Institute failed to take Greenetech. They're wounded, but they're not finished. I won't have Liberty Prime rotting in a warehouse while the Commonwealth teeters on the edge of a second occupation."
Ingram grunted. "Fine. But I'm not cutting her any slack. She so much as sneezes without warning, she's getting sedated."
"Good," Maxson said. "I'd expect nothing less."
With a brief nod from the Elder, the escort stepped aside to allow Madison and Ingram to exit. As the door slid shut behind them, Madison felt the weight of Maxson's words trailing her like a shadow.
They made their way down the metallic corridors of the Prydwen, Ingram walking half a step ahead. Madison didn't try to break the silence — she could feel the barely restrained friction pulsing off Ingram like heat off a reactor core.
Once they reached the lift chamber at the rear of the command deck, Ingram keyed in a sequence. The elevator rumbled down, the vertical shaft creaking with every meter of descent as they passed decks humming with activity — training bays, engineering compartments, briefing halls.
"You want me to believe this isn't some kind of setup?" Ingram finally said, not looking at her. "That you just came crawling back because your conscience woke up?"
"I don't expect you to believe anything," Madison replied. "But I didn't come here to clear my name. I came to make sure Prime doesn't become a weapon for blind annihilation."
Ingram scoffed. "You realize who you're talking to, right? This isn't some college seminar. We don't have time for moral balancing acts while synths teleport into settlements and start gunning down kids."
"I know what they're capable of. I helped build what they're capable of. That's exactly why I'm here."
The elevator jolted to a stop. The doors opened to reveal a transport hangar connected by a wide umbilical walkway leading to a waiting vertibird. Ingram motioned with her head.
"Come on. Your workshop's downstairs."
They boarded the vertibird without further words. The ride from the Prydwen down to Boston Airport was swift, buffered by freezing winds and whipping snow, the ruins of Logan International and the nearby Commonwealth stretched out below them like a bleeding, fractured corpse. From the air, the Brotherhood's expansion efforts were more visible — scaffolding snaked along the old runways, bunkers and prefabricated barracks rising from the skeletal debris.
When they landed, Madison stepped out into a biting wind. The air smelled like fuel, scorched ozone, and rust — the scent of war machinery reborn. Ingram led her through a fortified hangar entrance beneath the main structure of the airport, flanked by two power-armored Knights on silent overwatch.
Inside was a different world.
The hangar was massive — the kind of cavernous pre-war structure once meant for servicing cargo jets. Now, it had become a monument to engineering resurrection. Liberty Prime's parts lay across the floor and scaffolding like the scattered bones of a fallen god. The right arm, disassembled and partially fused with scaffolding, towered three stories high. The head — still scratched, weather-beaten, but unmistakable — rested on a reinforced dolly, cables running from its neck into a series of diagnostic consoles humming with energy.
Technicians and scribes moved through the space with practiced precision, occasionally casting wary glances at Madison as she entered.
Ingram strode ahead and turned sharply toward her. "This is it. Every piece we managed to salvage and reconstruct, we've spent years scraping it together. We've got power couplings, leg servos, the targeting module, and the reactor housing. What we don't have?"
She jabbed a finger at her own temple.
"The damn interface. The coordination logic. Prime's 'brain.' We've got maybe twenty percent of it. And every time we try to push it past a basic function cycle, the whole system goes into cascade failure."
Madison didn't respond right away. She stepped forward slowly, eyes roaming the massive machinery. Her fingers grazed the exposed plating of the torso module — beneath it, she knew, were the deep wells of data relays and cognitive control banks that only she had ever fully understood.
"I can fix it," she murmured. "But we'll need access to clean reactor lines. And a sterile lab for the core integration. This place is good for parts assembly, but it's not clean enough for neural weave calibration."
Ingram crossed her arms. "You're not in a position to make demands."
"It's not a demand," Madison said. "It's a technical reality. If you want Prime fully operational — not just as a battering ram, but as a thinking machine that can act in the field without hourly resets — we'll need more than just brute force. We'll need understanding."
Ingram stared at her for a long moment. Then she sighed and waved a technician over. "Bring her access keys. Level Three clearance, isolated systems only. She doesn't touch anything outside her assigned modules unless I say so."
The technician nodded and jogged off. Ingram turned back toward Madison, face unreadable.
"You build him up," she said. "But if you so much as try to rewrite him…"
"I won't," Madison said. "But I will make sure he doesn't become a weapon of genocide."
Ingram's jaw tightened, but she didn't argue.
"Then get to work," she said, turning to walk away. "We've got a war to win."
And with that, Madison Li was left standing among the disassembled limbs of Liberty Prime, the echoes of the Brotherhood's machines whirring around her like distant thunder. She closed her eyes for a moment, just long enough to remember what had once been a dream — and what now had to become redemption.
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• Name: Sico
• Stats :
S: 8,44
P: 7,44
E: 8,44
C: 8,44
I: 9,44
A: 7,45
L: 7
• Skills: advance Mechanic, Science, and Shooting skills, intermediate Medical, Hand to Hand Combat, Lockpicking, Hacking, Persuasion, and Drawing Skills
• Inventory: 53.280 caps, 10mm Pistol, 1500 10mm rounds, 22 mole rats meat, 17 mole rats teeth, 1 fragmentation grenade, 6 stimpak, 1 rad x, 6 fusion core, computer blueprint, modern TV blueprint, camera recorder blueprint, 1 set of combat armor, Automatic Assault Rifle, 1.500 5.56mm rounds, power armor T51 blueprint, Electric Motorcycle blueprint, T-45 power armor, Minigun, 1.000 5mm rounds, Cryolator, 200 cryo cell, Machine Gun Turret Mk1 blueprint, electric car blueprint, Kellogg gun, Righteous Authority, Ashmaker, Furious Power Fist, Full set combat armor blueprint, M240 7.62mm machine guns blueprint, Automatic Assault Rifle blueprint, and Humvee blueprint.
• Active Quest:-