Chapter Text
Begin again in the night
Let's sway again tonight
Your arm on my shoulder
Your cheek against mine
Hate is such a strong word.
It implies that a person's feelings towards something are passionate. Nobody just simply hates something, they do it because they have good reason to. Reasons that may be plentiful, justified, and have had a lot of time to develop.
This is why Lux refuses to use the word 'hate'. She thinks it's an ugly word, and she's not sure she has ever felt negatively towards anything passionately enough to warrant hatred. It's not a feeling that is so often evoked within her.
All this to say, however, that she truly dislikes the wasteland.
She can't think of a single redeeming quality that this barren, atom-charred place has to offer. Not one. It is hot, sweltering hot, under the sun, and it is muggy, yet somehow dry at the same time, and it is utterly teeming with monsters just gagging at the opportunity to eat her flesh - human and animal, and some secret third thing, alike.
If she knew the Mojave was going to be this gruelling to traverse, she would have just stayed comfortably tucked in beneath the mounds of dirt in the Goodsprings cemetery. She would have told Victor, 'No thank you, Pardner' and waved goodbye to Doc Mitchell when he had tried to stitch her up.
As it is, she was unconscious throughout that whole affair and the opportunity wasn't exactly presented to her. Not that she would have actually preferred to stay in the ground though, she supposes sweating like a pig under the mid-day sun beats suffocating to death with an infected bullet wound any day of the week.
And all of that said, she still has business to attend to. So she sucks in a deep breath, trying her very best not to gag at the taste of the rot-rich air that fills Freeside, and steps up to the securitron standing guard at the entrance to the Strip.
He's a beauty, she must admit. She almost reaches out to brush her fingers against his titanium casing, but stops herself before her hand moves without her permission. It will do her just fine to marvel from a distance.
The sound of rust grinding against rust causes her to wince as the securitron moves closer, assessing her with it's facial recognition scanner, though if she were anybody else that detail would have gone unnoticed.
"Submit to a credit check or present your passport before proceeding to the gate. Trespassers will be shot," it commands in a tinny voice.
"A credit check?" Her eyebrows draw together in confusion. She didn't know anything about a credit check.
Actually, she didn't know anything about any of this at all. She just knows that she needs to get to the other side of this gate, partially because she knows Benny to be there and she'd like to exchange a few words with him, but partially because of some nagging voice at the back of her mind telling her that that is where she needs to be.
She's learned to trust her instincts over the last month or so since she woke up. Since being shot in the head, twice apparently though she can't recall the second time, her memory has been foggy. If foggy means totally and completely erased. She has retained absolutely nothing from her life up until this point, other than her personality and her award winning smile, which seem to be getting more and more difficult to maintain as the days go by.
"What's a credit check?" She continues at the robot's silence.
"Admission to the Strip requires an official passport or proof that you are carrying the required minimum balance. These policies prevent less-reputable persons from entering and ensure a good time will be had by all who enter the Strip."
Ah, so it's their way of keeping the impoverished of Freeside in Freeside.
"Well, how much is the required minimum balance?" She asks, adjusting her weight to her other foot and resting a hand on her hip.
The itchy material of the dress she's wearing irritates the sensitive skin of her palm, if you can even call it a dress. It's more like a rag, or a sack. She found it in the wardrobe in her bedroom back at Novac, half eaten by moths or whatever the wasteland equivalent of one is, and mostly rotten away. It's more mold than dress at this point, truth be told.
It's still the best looking article of clothing she's managed to find though, so wear it she will until it eventually tears completely at the seams and falls from her body, or until she can find a suitable alternative. Preferably, a prettier dress with half as many holes.
She rubs the dirty fabric between her fingers idly, desperate for something to distract her from the nausea brought on by the heat.
"Two-thousand caps." Her eyes almost bug out of her head at that. She doesn't have two-thousand caps! She doesn't even know of anyone who has two-thousand caps. What an absurd amount of money!
"Oh, wow! And here I was, thinking the Strip would be an affordable place to holiday," she jokes, smiling a little wider to distract the robot from her shock horror.
She's not sure why she does that, but it's a habit she seems to carry around with her. Appealing to robots that is, or attempting to, anyway. Maybe it's her love for the artificially-intelligent things, or maybe it's her dire need for approval. Maybe it's a mix of both.
"You wouldn't be willing to give a lady a small discount would you, sugar? You see, I have very important business on the Strip, but I just simply don't have the funds. Now, I have a thousand caps I can give you now, no problem at all, and I could come back, say, two weeks from now with the remaining thousand?" She shuffles uncomfortably and hopes the robot doesn't clock the movement. She doesn't have a thousand caps, she doesn't even have five hundred. But if she can get the robot to drop down to half, she might be able to convince it to drop down even further.
"Submit to a credit check or present your passport before proceeding to the gate. Trespassers will be shot," the robot repeats. Lux groans and turns around, ready to sulk the night away in some dirty, sticky room in the depths of the Atomic Wrangler when a voice comes from her left.
"Did you just try to charm the robot, or am I going senile?" She turns to see a man grinning up at her from his seat on the pavement, a look of disbelief on his face.
"It works sometimes." She sighs, taking a step away from the securitron and kneeling next to the man on the floor, keeping her knees together and refusing to sit fully down. "Not this time, clearly. Some of them are programmed with a touch more humanity than others, guess these ones are only fit to be guards."
She leans her chin on one palm and extends the other between them for him to shake, a gesture from the old world she saw in a magazine once. It's been mostly forgotten in the wasteland but this man seems the type to know of such gestures.
"Name's Lux," she tells him, tilting her head slightly. The grin on his face stretches into a smile and he grabs her hand with his own, shaking it once.
"You can call me Old Ben, pretty name you got there."
"Why thank you, Mr Ben. Got it on account of my shining good looks." She swishes her white hair around for effect. He cocks his head at her like a confused dog, the cogs in his brain clearly working to figure out the correlation. "It's Latin, means light. Or so I've been told anyway."
In some ways, losing her memory was a good thing. Being able to rename herself however she liked being one of them, though she didn't technically name herself. When she woke up the first thing she was asked was what her name was, a question she couldn't answer which is how Doc Mitchell found out the depth of her amnesia. He was the one who had suggested the name, apparently he had an interest in linguistics and the name matched her nicely.
He called her 'light' on account of her albinism, a rare trait in the wasteland, and one that makes her stand out in any setting like a sore thumb. It gets her a lot of attention, both wanted and unwanted, but it suits her just fine. She's quite grateful for it actually, all of the beautiful women from the old world had blonde hair and if she wasn't born with it she'd have found a way to get it.
"Ah, like the fellas from over the river, right?" His eyes narrow a little as he looks her up and down, "You legion?"
"You ever seen a woman legionary before, Mr Ben?" She asks politely but on the inside she rolls her eyes to the back of her skull. She stands up and steps away from him, her arms coming up to cross over her chest.
If this conversation is gonna become yet another one about the legion and it's politics then she'll just leave while she's ahead of it. If she had a cap for every time someone has talked her ear off about Caesar and his boys, or tried to, then she wouldn't be standing here right now. Instead, she'd be on the other side of that gate living it up in Vegas.
"No, I can't say that I have. Sorry miss, didn't mean to offend you." He scratches the back of his neck awkwardly before pushing himself off of the ground to stand face-to-face with her.
Now that he's standing up she can see that he's actually quite tall, taller than her at least. She tilts her chin just a bit to meet his eyes.
"Well, Ms Lux, since you're new to Freeside I'll give you a little advice." Lux raises an eyebrow at him, expecting another spiel about how she should watch her back and how she simply has to give him two hundred caps for her protection, and blah-blah-blah. She's heard it all before, five times since she stepped foot through the gate to Freeside in fact, and she's not going to fall for it again.
"I don't need your protection sugar, sorry to disappoint." She smiles at him and turns to walk away, intending to make her way towards one of the stores she saw on her way in to hopefully be able to sell enough crap to pay for the credit check when he stops her.
"Now, now, that's not what I was gonna say. Just that, in case you were thinking of trying your luck running past that robot there, those bots are programmed to vaporise anyone who enters the fenced-in area without authorisation from the greeter." She pauses her steps.
"Oh," she mutters, blinking at him. She wasn't expecting some genuine advice from anyone in this place. Or any place at all, the entirety of the Mojave is home to all sorts of unsavoury people, many of which have tried their damndest to scam her out of the little caps she has. She always managed to use her charm to get the price of whatever they were trying to sell her down a bit, but she lacked the street smarts to always identify the scams for what they were - scams.
She isn't by any means a stupid woman, she could tell you a hundred different ways to reprogram an assaultron so that, instead of cutting you in half with lasers and swords, it will cook you a nice gecko steak, but when it comes to understanding the people of the wastes… well, let's just say she can be a bit dense.
"Well, thank you. I thought that they might have been." She reaches up to twirl one silvery strand of hair around her index finger, looking over her shoulder at the big, imposing securitrons.
She drags her eyes over their metal frames, trying to ascertain what types of weapons they carry on them. From what she can recall, Victor seemed to have a gatling laser built into him, which he used with seemingly no reservations at all. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to assume that all securitrons own the same weaponry.
How she has come to possess such knowledge about complex machinery is all thanks to the very same doctor that gave her her name - Doc Mitchell. He had an extensive collection of perfectly preserved prewar books, all from the vault he was citizen of, or so he claimed. When Lux woke up she couldn't remember a thing, but she did have her personality, and with her personality came her passions, robotics being one of them.
Doc Mitchell didn't exactly have a wide range of books on robotics, but he did have a good few, three to be exact, and so while she was waiting for the persistent headaches and ever-present nausea to subside, she spent her time reading up on the lost material.
It was quite an exciting time, all things considered. During her weeks at Goodsprings she burned through forty-three books - these included the entirety of Doc Mitchell's collection, a big pile she found in the old schoolhouse, a decent collection gifted to her by Easy Pete, and one or two from Sunny.
Easy Pete had the best ones though by far, having been a scavenger - or as he liked to call it: a prospector - he'd often come across pre-war books. He claimed he wasn't interested in them, but for a man who wasn't interested he certainly had a sizable collection.
She does mourn having easy access to such extensive knowledge, having been forced to say goodbye to the books when she left town, but she had to leave eventually. Maybe she can start up a collection of her own once she deals with Benny.
She hasn't given much thought to what will become of her once this mess is over and done with. To be honest, she never really expected to make it this far.
If one thing has become increasingly obvious during her time spent in the wastes, it's that she was never a fighter. Not a single part of combat came naturally to her, not the holding of a gun, nor the swinging of her fists when push came to shove. The first fight she got into was with a group of powder gangers trying to hurt this fellow back in Goodsprings, Ringo, and that ended about as badly as you'd expect.
That fight had pushed her recovery back by weeks. She had managed to get a fresh concussion, as well as reopen the two bullet wounds in her hairline. But the worst was the way she felt when she watched a man drop to the floor, blood pouring from a hole in his face and limbs limp. She felt sick to her stomach.
She couldn't imagine being the one to cause that.
She brings her bottom lip between her teeth as she considers the robots at the gate, trying to think of a way to get through. There's no chance in hell that she's going to get those caps, not any time soon at least.
She could always just wait Benny out, but from what she's heard he's the head of one of the casinos on the Strip, so he might not even leave for another couple of months. If at all, since she's sure he knows that she's awake by now thanks to that infuriating man on the radio who insists on airing her business to the entire Mojave.
"I might have another way…" she trails off, talking more to herself than to Old Ben.
"Well, just make sure you go about it safely, yeah? Wouldn't want you turned into a pretty little shadow on the wall now, would we?" He smirks as he says it, which causes her to laugh lightly, but the words were completely serious.
"Well, I'll certainly try. See you around, Mr Ben." She brushes her hand against his arm softly, grateful for his advice even if it was a little useless.
The idea she has to get through the gate relies entirely on the forgotten note in her delivery bag, tucked in right at the bottom and probably ripped and crumpled from having everything shoved on top of it. It's one of the only things she has left of her old life, probably the only thing now that she thinks about it. Doc Mitchell had handed it to her just before she left his house for the first time.
The note is the one that, she assumes, was given to her when she was given the platinum chip. She doesn't remember much, or anything, about accepting the delivery, but she does know that she was supposed to deliver it here, at the South Gate to New Vegas. Perhaps if she shows the note to the securitron, he'll let her through. Or at the very least call a human over to discuss the delivery with her and she can work her charm on him.
"Submit to a credit check or present your passport before proceeding to the gate. Trespassers will be shot."
"Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time darling. I have something here that might be of interest to you." She twists her body to rummage through her Mojave Express satchel, silently praying that she didn't accidentally throw it out at some point along the way.
Her fingers brush the paper and she latches onto it with a small amount of triumph, lifting it out of the bag and presenting it to the securitron with a smile on her face.
"See! I'm supposed to be here. Now, I wasn't told about a credit check when I accepted this here delivery so I assume I'm exempt from it? If not, I'd like to meet the man who is supposed to accept the delivery from me, please and thank you." She feels somewhat proud of herself for thinking this up.
The securitron begins to repeat the same phrase as before when the metallic voice suddenly cuts off. There's the sound of static when the image on it's screen glitches in and out of visibility, but only for a second until the bot is back to how it was before.
"Access to the Strip has been granted, please stand still so that a passport can be created."
There's a sudden flash that blinds her for half a second and she realises a little belatedly that it was a photograph. She's never had one taken before, or at least she doesn't think she has, but she knows all about them from the magazines and books she's spent so much time consuming.
She keeps a photograph on her at all times actually, it's one of her favourite possessions. Folded neatly into quarters and kept safely tucked between the belt of her dress and the soft skin of her tummy is a photo of the most beautiful woman she's ever seen - blonde, pale, a red-lipped smile stretching across her face and a white dress hugging her frame. Lux doesn't know her name, but she knows that she was popular.
It was taken from the first magazine she had ever laid her hands on. Doc Mitchell had handed it to her shortly after she woke up, she had just looked into the mirror and broken down into tears at her appearance. She was filthy, her white hair caked with mud, and her one eye temporarily closed from the constant stream of blood pouring from the partially-stitched up bullet holes in her forehead. Doc Mitchell did his best to clean her up but there's only so much you can do to a wounded area when the only source of water you have is irradiated.
The magazine he gave her made her feel better, made her feel like she could be better. She used it to style herself. She had held it up in the mirror as she cut her hair with a rusty knife and made herself as pretty as she could with the materials she had. Now she keeps the photo with her at all times, to remind her that she can be better.
She has a sinking feeling in her chest that the impromptu photograph the securitron has just taken of her is probably the ugliest thing imaginable, but she tries not to worry about that at the moment. She bids her farewell to the robots at the gate and, after sending a wave over her shoulder to Old Ben and whoever else might be hovering around to watch her get free access to the Strip, she squeezes her way through.
Before she even has the chance to take in the sights that surround her another securitron wheels up to her, it's brakes screeching unpleasantly as it stops just centimetres from her boots. She looks up with her face scrunched in annoyance but any frustration dissolves at the sight of her favourite cowboy smiling down at her.
"Victor!" She smiles brightly as she leans forward to give his boxy frame a hug.
"Well howdy partner! You've come a far piece, haven't you? Welcome to New Vegas!" She leans back just enough to lift a hand between them, her fingers brushing over the warm glass of his screen to check it's all intact.
"Welcome to New Vegas yourself cowboy! How've you been? It's been so long I started to worry you'd gotten yourself dismantled!"
She stays close to him for as long as she can bear the persistent sound of static and whirring machinery. She spent a few days travelling with a lovely fellow named Boone about two weeks ago and her ears have been sensitive ever since, far too many rifle shots far too close to her for her to not feel the repercussions.
She was grateful having him around but she could only spend so much time with a man set on revenge, once she explained to him that she wouldn't be going after the legion any time soon he bade her farewell. She did so enjoy his company though, hopefully they'll meet again.
"Oh you don't ever have to worry about old Vic, friend. Now, I have something to tell ya, and you're never gonna believe it!"
Lux's ears prick up at that and she tilts her head in curiosity, her hair draping over her shoulder as she does so. It's grown much longer since she left Goodsprings and she can't wait to get the opportunity to cut it again.
"Get this - the head honcho of New Vegas, Mr House, is just itching to make your acquaintance. He asked me to tell you to mosey your way over to the Lucky 38, it's the big ol' tower shaped like a roulette wheel, and head on up to the penthouse!"
Lux blinks at him blankly for a second, not fully understanding what it is he had just said. Mr House wants to see her?
"He's still alive?" Is the first thing she asks, and she cringes a little at the bluntness of the question, "Sorry sugar, I just mean that… you know? I wasn't aware. But, sure! I'll get right on that!"
An accented chuckle sounds from Victor's speakers at her fumbling and the securitron spins around rather suddenly. Deducting that he's about to make his way to the Lucky 38 entrance, Lux quickly loops her arm with his and follows the slow pace he sets for her.
"Of course he's still alive! You mean to tell me you haven't heard a word about him in your travels?"
"Of course I've heard about him, all of the books I've read on robotics mention his name quite generously after all, I just wasn't aware that he was still kickin'." She purses her lips in thought, trying to remember if his name actually has been mentioned to her over the last couple of weeks.
She thinks she'd remember if it had, but then again, there's a lot she can't remember.
"How?" She asks simply, trying her hardest to wrack her brain for any information she had read in her books as to just how he might still be alive. "Is he a ghoul?"
"I reckon some of those questions you have will be answered by the boss himself! Just head on up, darlin', I'll meet ya up there."
"Thank you Victor, you've been a doll." She smiles graciously at him and gives his metal arm a good-natured tap as she turns away from him and towards the giant doors of the Lucky 38.
She hadn't realised just how loud and busy the Strip was until the doors closed behind her. The 38 is entirely silent, the only sounds that she can hear at all is the tinnitus she suffers with thanks to Boone and the low hum of electricity. It's deeply unsettling, the eeriness of being in a room so dark and quiet after having spent the last couple of weeks in almost constant sunlight, accompanied by at least one living being.Now, there's absolutely nothing.
The lights come on rather suddenly, though to call them light would be generous. They seem to be as dim as they could possibly get without being turned off completely, but they do offer a small amount of visibility that otherwise wasn't there.
Her eyes immediately zero in on what looks to be a large blood stain a couple feet in front of her, and she can feel the hair on her arms stand on end.
"Uh, Victor?" She calls out, eyes not leaving the stain on the carpet. "You here, sugar?"
"Yes ma'am, I am!" The suddenness of his voice causes her to jump out of her skin, she looks up to see that he has somehow managed to sneak up behind her.
"Jesus! Lower your volume, Victor! You can't just scare a lady like that!" She swats at his arm instinctively, wincing as her nails hit metal and send shocks up her arm.
"Sorry to frighten you, friend! Didn't mean no harm by it," he says apologetically, his volume lowered a considerable amount. She wonders just how much humanity this bot has been programmed with.
"What's the deal with—"
"Why don't we head upstairs, friend? Wouldn't want to keep the boss waiting now, would we?" He cuts her off, causing her to blink up at him in shock. It's not often that she's interrupted, so it's always a shock when it happens. She isn't a small bit offended by it, but she elects to ignore it in favour of getting in the elevator opposite them and getting out of this god-forsaken room.
Her stomach drops just a bit when she notices Victor staying outside of the elevator. She moves to put her hand in between the closing doors to stop them but she's too late, maybe for the best that she didn't disable herself right before meeting the most important man in New Vegas.
As if to make matters worse, an unsettling, warped tune begins to sound from the speakers next to the doors. The music causes the feeling of dread she has pooling in her chest to worsen and she tries to close her eyes and breathe through the anxiety.
She's not sure why she's so… scared? Is she scared? Nervous maybe. She shouldn't be either way, but this place is just so different to anything she's ever known. Not to mention the fact that she's travelling upwards thirty-eight floors at an unknown speed to meet a man she thought was dead, who specifically requested her presence for a reason she is not aware of.
She exhales deeply, leaning against the back wall of the elevator and listening to the methodical tick of the floor numbers slowly counting up. The feeling of moving without actually moving is unsettling her stomach, she lifts an arm to wrap it around herself and silently wills the nausea away.
Victor said he would meet her up at the penthouse, and he'd never lied to her about where he would be before. He said he'd be in Novac, and he was. He said he would be in New Vegas, and he was. Maybe having a friendly face beside her will help to calm her down enough for her to not make a fool of herself. One can only hope.
Besides the feelings of dread and motion sickness, she's actually very excited to meet Mr House. He's become something of a celebrity to her since she read her first book on robotics.
It was actually a book entirely about him, or his industry rather, and she had read it cover to cover, summary included. It had detailed everything about Robco from the moment House had founded it to the moment the bombs fell. How that makes sense, she doesn't know, but a lot of things don't make sense in the wasteland. It must have been published by a former employee, or by House himself now that she knows he's alive.
She tries to distract herself from the odd atmosphere with the idea of actually talking to someone from before the war. She'd be lying if she said that she didn't idolise the old world just a little bit, and she'd be lying still if she said that it was only a little bit. Sure, she's spoken to ghouls before, but all of them had led quite boring lives. Not that she said that to their faces of course, but it was a bit of a snooze fest when she had spoken to Raul and found that his current life isn't much different to his old one.
Speaking to someone who, not only lived before the war, but was the richest man in America and owner of the most successful business back then… well, it's invigorating to say the least. She hopes he's okay with chatty people because she is planning on talking his ear off, if it hasn't already fallen off due to ghoulification.
Or, maybe he's not a ghoul. God, she really hopes he isn't one of those brain bots. Those things give her the creeps, always zooming around with the liquid in their caps sloshing around their exposed brain. Disgusting.
The elevator dings and she blinks her eyes open, happy to note that she had managed to daydream the entire, awful trip away.
The first thing that greets her is a securitron, except this one has a unique face, one she hasn't seen before. She takes a step forward, hand shooting out to stabilise herself on the doorframe when her legs wobble dangerously.
"Easy there, sugar! Don't want you falling down now." The bot speaks and immediately Lux is in love. She has that classic 1950's movie star voice, a velvety cadence that mirrors Lux's own fabricated version, but more smooth and natural.
Lux straightens immediately, hands coming to smooth down her dress so that she at least looks somewhat decent. It doesn't do much to distract from her overall dirty appearance, much to her dismay, but she's content in the knowledge that she tried her best.
Once she's satisfied with her appearance she looks up at the bot with a sickly sweet smile on her face, a little forced but mostly derived from the happiness she feels at hearing a voice from the era she loves so dearly.
"Thank you for the concern, darling, but I'm quite alright. Just a little out of sorts from that elevator ride." The bot doesn't respond and she's reminded of it's artificial intelligence, it doesn't dampen her mood any though.
"Who are you, miss?" She prompts, folding her hands neatly in front of her. She's very interested in the background of this securitron, most of them share the same programming but it's clear that she was made differently for a reason. She had asked Victor the very same question not too long ago, but he had given a predictably vague answer.
"I'm Jane, one of Mr House's girls. We keep him… entertained," Lux scrunches her nose in thinly veiled disgust at that, only for a second before she remembers her place and covers it with a less-enthused smile, "we don't get many guests lately, perhaps we can keep you entertained too?"
"Oh, I don't think I'm after the sort of entertainment you have been programmed for darling." Lux gives her a wink as she says that.
Honestly, she should have expected House to have at least one sex bot. The man does run a giant robotics industry after all, he obviously has a passion for them. Maybe too much passion.
"One of?" She asks, looking around to try to spot the other robot girls, though she's not sure she actually wants to.
"Oh yes! Me and Marilyn were both programmed to keep him company during the war, I'm sure you'll meet her eventually!" She doesn't seem to offer much conversationally unless prompted, and unfortunately for her Lux isn't particularly interested in maintaining her company.
She's just about to ask her for directions to meet House when the telltale sound that she's come to associate with approaching securitrons comes from her left. She turns and finds herself face to face with Victor once again.
"Nice to see you again, Victor! I knew you wouldn't let me down." She walks towards him quickly, eager to be out of the presence of the bot behind her.
"Howdy partner! The big boss is right in here!" He wheels away from her, leading her through a thin pair of curtains that are acting as a doorway separating the room she's currently in from the next.
The room behind the curtains is no bigger than the room she had first stepped into, but it somehow feels more important. She had expected to find a long meeting table, like the ones she's seen in so many of the decrepit old buildings surrounding the Vegas area, only this time someone would be sitting at the end of it. A very prominent someone.
She's quite surprised to find that, not only is there no table, there isn't even anyone in there. House is nowhere to be seen. She decides that he must be very rude to show up late to a meeting he scheduled.
Just as she's about to find a place for her to sit, the room is filled with the crackle of electricity and the green glow of the monitor at the end of the room coming to life. A picture is displayed on the screen of a man from before the war, it's a picture she's seen many times in her textbooks and one she recognises immediately as House.
"It's been a while, hasn't it Ms Nightingale?"