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I found the first one bent over a railing at a train station.
Since leaving Vault 76, I’d become accustomed to dead bodies. Much more than I thought I would given how I puked after my first few kills. They can train you all you like in the vault, prepare you for life after Reclamation Day, but you learn very quickly out in Appalachia that there’s nothing like the real thing. In the vault, if I missed a shot, it just meant my score would drop so I would have to get in more practice for next time. Moving targets could be predicted once you learned the patterns and where the tracks for the targets were. A successful hit made the target stop moving with a simple cheerful ding. A shooting gallery like at the county fair in the old days my parents told me about.
But in the world outside the vault, people don’t move on neat tracks. A successful hit results in death and sometimes gore. Miss your shot, and you might give your position away which meant people shooting back or even running up to kill you before you can reload. (I still can’t believe I managed to dodge out of the way of getting my guts sliced open that first time. Every time I get dressed, there’s this big ugly scar on my stomach that reminds me to choose my shots carefully much better than any lowered score could.) You watch the way heads explode and brain matter flies everywhere enough times through the scope, and you grow numb to it. You’re just making targets stop moving again, and the ding only plays in your head.
I was never that strong, but I’ve always been smart. More interested in computers than sports. I preferred things to be quiet which is why I spent so much time alone. I have friends and can have a good time with them, but I don’t like being in groups of people. The trainers helped me improve my agility so I could be better at sneaking around. Most people think someone with glasses makes a poor sniper, but I can use a scope just as well as someone without them. Just had to get used to how the recoil would try and shove the nose pads into my eyes. Learned to maintain and upgrade my weapons, reasonably take care of my armor, and some basic farming after leaving the vault. Throw in lockpicking and hacking, and I’m pretty self-sufficient. I don’t go in guns blazing, and I’m not hauling much around with me, but I come back alive. That’s enough for me.
I always leaned more toward Mistress of Mystery than Grognak or even the Silver Shroud, loved the radio plays and comics with her most of all. That was why this corpse stuck out: The tattered dress was black with green chevrons on it. Heels, black leggings, and long black evening gloves, everything matched the basics of the Mistress’s costume. When I searched through her body, I found the holotape.
That’s where it started.
I followed the instructions, went to the mansion, found the secret entrance, and made my way inside. I put on a spare dress and signed into Cryptos as a new Novice of Mystery. There was nobody at the hideout, just me. The Order of Mystery was gone, but I wanted to know what had happened. I read the old logs. This Sisterhood…they were like me. They weren’t the strongest people out there or less prone to the new horrible diseases of Appalachia, but they were clever, they were quiet, and they took out their enemies through sniper scopes. I had to know why this Sisterhood had died out before I could truly join them.
So I followed the last mission, found out how the raiders knew where the Mistresses would show up. The betrayal. That absolute brat Olivia. Maybe I should’ve had sympathy for her given the expectations she had to live up to, but reading about her killing one of her sisters? I have a sister, a biological one. She and her husband are quite a team, and I adore them both so much that I dropped the “in law” after “brother” within days of their marriage. They are my family. The very idea of hearing about their deaths makes me sick; the idea of killing them, my brain refuses to consider it even hypothetically. Meanwhile Olivia’s excuse was…what? Her sisters weren’t biologically related to her? She was under a lot of pressure from her mother? My sister, brother, and I are among those tasked with trying to help rebuild civilization. I get growing up and feeling neglected, but a missed camping trip was what weighed on her more than killing a member of her family?
No. Olivia was greedy, selfish. She wanted power and didn’t like how her mother led the group to work from the shadows. She could have left the Order with all of those skills so she could survive and build up her own group, running it the way she wanted, but she stayed to slaughter these people who wanted to do something good and trusted her as one of them.
I left the mansion with an approximate idea of where she and her mother had met up, now an official full Mistress according to the recordings and Cryptos’s programming. The Order would live again for one last mission that I set for myself. I was dressed in our uniform. I was armed with the Blade of Bastet and the Voice of Set that I’d forged for myself, but – most importantly – my rifle. I’d see if I could find any clues of where she’d gone after the meetup.
I expected to find the corpse of Shannon Rivers, the original Mistress whose voice I knew so well from those old recordings long before I found the Order. I didn’t expect to find Olivia, too.
Mrs. Rivers had recorded the encounter, probably for any of her loyal daughters that decided to come looking for her so they would know what had happened. I could hear their blades clash. For a moment, I was back in the vault, listening to the old recordings, cheering on the Mistress. She would win. She always did.
But her corpse was right in front of me. She’d lost. Olivia may have dealt the final blow, but the hard work had been done by time. Mrs. Rivers had been slowed down by age and everyday living out here. Olivia only won because Mrs. Rivers wasn’t in her prime anymore.
I nearly threw up when Olivia called to Brody and confirmed that Mrs. Rivers had been the last one. There were no other Mistresses out there who’d escaped and might one day reclaim the mansion and rebuild. The Order was just me now, the one who’d signed up after it was all over.
Brody killing her in the end would have been poetic if this was just another radio play. But as narratively satisfying as it was, it left me hollow. I’d wanted to avenge the sisters I’d never gotten to meet, and the man who helped Olivia betray them all got the kill shot? How unfair.
But this is Appalachia. Fairness is for the vault.
The recording cut out as he positioned the bodies. Perhaps he felt some sort of remorse for his part, moving Olivia to hold Mrs. Rivers’ body which she likely would never have done herself.
I buried Mrs. Rivers there.
I kicked Olivia’s body off the overlook.
I took only three things from the scene: the recording, an advanced sniper rifle I found close by (I like to think it’s Mrs. Rivers’s), and a jewel that had been pinned to Mrs. Rivers’s own uniform: the Eye of Ra. I went back to the mansion one last time to find one of her spare uniforms, the full costume of the Mistress of Mystery. It took me a few tries, but I made armor to resemble it, and pinned the broach in place. A lot of people think I look silly but that’s pretty much par for the course of Appalachia: you cobble together whatever you can even if you look ridiculous in the process. Besides, the veil over my mouth is more practical than most given how many contaminants and hazards you can accidentally breathe in while roaming the Wasteland.
As for the raiders, well, they almost never see me coming, and none of them ever see me leave.
I’m just a Mystery to them.