The Bear, The Bull, And The Pony

It was all going to plan, but of course as many things in the wasteland have before and will forever after something fucked up and completely derailed everything. Suddenly Six’s vision was replaced by bright flashing colors, and the feeling of being thrown around at high speeds.

“WHAT THE FUUUCK!!?” Six screamed as his body hurled through the failed teleportaion.

Being tossed around and eye fucked with bright colors for what felt like hours, Six is spit out and thrown to the ground. His ears ring, eyes straining against the new light, and his head pounding. Taking a moment to readjust, Six stays lying with his back on the ground and his eyes screwed shut.

A couple minutes later he slowly sits up and opens his eyes. The light is blinding and Six has to force his eyes to open. His hands brush against the ground and he feels something familiar, sand. Was he in a desert? The Mojave?

His eyes now adjusted and able to see the ground beneath him, Six concludes that he is not in the Mojave, the ground is too different. Instead he assumes that he was just thrown to some random dead and destroyed part of Earth.

Beside him lies the Transportalponder letting out a beep as it slowly dies. Grabbing it and prying it open he tries to tinker with the insides to see if he can fix it and use it to get back to Big M.T. but finds it completely unresponsive. The little radar going haywire trying to lock onto anything. A few more minutes of testing and failure to get anything later, Six stows away the piece of shit transporter and utters a single word,

“Fuck.”

Standing up and dusting himself off Six takes a look around him. Observing the careful details such as the sunscorched rocks, the dead shrubbery, and the vast swaths of barren dusty land, six came to the ever insightful conclusion, he was in the middle of bum fuck nowhere surrounded by absolutley fucking nothing.

Nodding to himself Six opens his pipboy to use his map and try to pinpoint exactly where on earth he was. But to his surprise the map wasn’t working, the only thing he could see was the static on the screen and his own reflection.

“Well…ain't that a thing. I’ve never seen that happen before.”

Thinking back to everything he’s gone through, Six couldn't remember a single time his pipboy’s map wasn't able to show anything. Even that time at the Sierra Madre when Father Elijha hacked his pipboy and the poison fog blotted out the sky did his map still work.

“Gonna have to do this the old fashioned way aren't I” Six said with a sigh. Unhooking his backpack and setting it down, Six roots through it until finding something he thought he would never have to use, an old pre-war gold compass.

It was a random lucky find that Six looted (grave robbed) from an old bunker back in the commonwealth. He was saving it to scrap later intent on just ripping it open and repurposing it. Who knew that today was the day that that old compass would be useful for something other than parts.

Bringing it out and rehooking his pack, Six tries to decide what direction he should start walking in. He spends a little while trying to find any signs that might indicate that one of the directions would be more worthwhile to travel down, but finds nothing of note. Finally deciding to just walk north and hope for the best. If anything it just means there's more walking in his future. Like he hasn't done a ton of that already.

“I should really invest in a vehicle of sorts. Maybe a motorcycle, tons of those left out in the Mojave. Most in pretty good condition too.” Six says to himself thinking out loud. “Beats walking everywhere, that's for damn sure.”

And so Six walked. The sounds of the wind, rocks cracking and falling in the distance, and the dust beneath his boots echoing through the dead barren land. Hours passed and the sun was slowly setting on the Horizon.

Six debated on if he should look for a shelter for the night as he was still in unknown territory and it would really suck to run into some deathclaws that might be out hunting.

But Six figured that he couldn’t be that far out from some kind of civilization so he continued on his way. It’s not like can’t just fight his way out of any situation he might find himself in. As long as it’s not like an army of deathclaws or synths that attack him, he should be fine.

Pressing on into the night, Six took a moment to really admire the night sky. He was so used to the bright lights of the commonwealth or the strip and the constant fight for survival that he forgot just how beautiful the sky looks at night. There are so many stars up there. It made him wonder what would have been if humanity didn’t kill the planet in that pointless war.

Maybe he shouldn't have killed House and taken the strip with Yes-Man. He did say he could have had humanity up there in just a couple hundred years. But Six quickly threw those thoughts away, what’s done is already done. House is dead, humanity is fractured, and the world is irreversibly wounded.

At least the hope still remains, he saw it once in the Divide, even though they are also gone, and Six remembers nothing about them. But people like Ulysses still do, so that hope still lives.

The moon was right above him, if Six had to guess he had been walking north for about 15 hours now. In the distance he could see a large mountain range that stretched on for miles in both the east and west directions. Six guessed that they either encircled whatever kind of desert he was in or created a huge wall that made a natural border to whatever was on the other side. Continuing the walk toward the mountains, Six started creating a plan on how he would have to scale them in order to reach the other side if his theory about them creating a crater wall around these badlands was true.

It was only when he got closer to them that he saw something in the northwest that immediately caught his attention. It was a path, a purposely made and traveled down path! This was his first sign of some sort of civilization out here. Changing his course Six jogged his way down to it.

When he reached it he noticed old tracks left behind in the ground. Divits in the earth that looked to be made by a wagon. And horse hooves? Horses? Six thought they went extinct after the war. The last time he saw one was back before the war when he was still in the military on a tour. Beautiful creatures they were.

But these tracks mean that at least some of them survived, somehow. Either that or these are remnants of the institute's work, although Six highly doubted that. They were too cagey on their work to ever let it come down here to the wastes. So that means some did survive, and that also means Six might get the chance to meet one of these animals again. With newfound excitement Six set down the path, continuing his long walk yet again.