Sunset's Isekai

by Wanderer D

Set the World on Fire (Fallout 4 - Pt. 2)

The silence was broken by a log splitting on the fire.

"Come on, Nick," Piper said, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees. She studied the synth for a moment. "You can't expect us to believe that."

"We've seen some weird shit," Cait added, "but I'm not falling for something like this."

"Is this whole thing a metaphor?" Danse asked, frowning at his beer as if it held the answers. "I've always had trouble with those."

"Har. Har." Nick shook his head, leaning forth to poke the fire with a long stick. "Do you want to hear the rest of it, or not?"

When the others muttered that they did, he nodded.

I know what it sounds like. A wolf big enough to keep a man, or synth, down with one paw? Not only that, but one that turns into golden mist at will? A girl dressed like Robin Hood, bow and arrows included, and another that flows down on some sort of staff?

Old Boston is a place of booze, drugs, criminals, mutants and violence. A place where the unwary get lost, killed, looted and left to rot. And yet here I was, in a firefight alongside these same weirdos, witnessing what should have been impossible.

I wouldn't blame you if you called me crazy. Hell, I was half tempted to walk away right there to the nearest mechanic to have my brain and eyes checked on my own. But, unless I was imagining them too, the two very human-looking girls were also acting like a wolf turning into mist was normal.

I studied the pair as we made our way past crumbling buildings, listening to their conversation, trying to learn what might've brought them here and seeking me out, but they were keeping their conversation a little too casual, as if the matter needing solving was almost a second thought… except that I could tell they were nervous, and oddly enough, it wasn't because of the danger around us.

Robyn—the Irish one—was actually the same age as Luz, but acted more like an older girl, or maybe someone that had grown up trained to hunt or survive. She kept her guard and walked steadily but stealthily, keeping her eyes moving, studying shadows, windows, rubble for hidden enemies and traps. She kept an arrow at the ready at all times. She did not act paranoid, but cautious. She was experienced like a tracker, or a hunter.

Luz on the other hand, strolled ahead of us with an almost cocky bluster, her arms behind her head and the staff with the owl on it between her arms and the back of her neck. She was exposed, blatantly oblivious to danger as far as I could see, and worse, overly energetic and loud. A combination that could get a synth scrapped in these ruins.

A hawk cried above us, weaving its way through the buildings, making both Luz and Robyn stop. I almost stumbled into them, but managed to avoid that by grabbing the edge of the wall next to us.

I almost jokingly asked Robyn if she could talk to that one too, but bit my tongue when I saw her smile at it.

Of course she would.

Nick watched the hawk as it spiraled down to land on Robyn's shoulder, chirping to her. She nodded, glancing at Luz, then at him. "Merlyn says there's danger ahead."

"What kind of danger?" Nick asked, ignoring the fact that the girl claimed to have understood a bird. The wolf earlier had been almost enough, and who knew what kind of weird mutations the Wasteland could produce? "Raiders? Gunners?"

Robyn gave him a look. "Is it Raiders? How would I know? Merlyn's a hawk. He can't speak in words." She turned to Luz. "Are ye sure he's a detective?"

Luz chuckled. "Hey now, he's not used to us."

Robyn sighed. "Sorry," she said, turning to glance at Nick. "Didn't mean to offend. This place is just…" She shuddered, glancing around, eyes narrowed. "Unnatural... There's not a sign of nature—real nature—around. The plants are sick… even the wooded areas outside of this city are… contaminated, somehow. The air stinks… even Kilkenny in the middle of summer wasn't this smelly."

"No offense taken," Nick assured her. It was very clear that her very healthy paranoia was not just a result of the immediate danger in the area, but also her being uncomfortable in a setting like this. 

Wooded area? Stinky air? She sounds like she's been living in the mountains. Maybe these girls are originally from the Appalachia area? I had heard that the area wasn't as demolished as other parts of the country. That would explain why they sound so different and act so different.

Seeing a window of opportunity, he took it. "You mentioned Kilkenny? I'm not aware of a town around here named that, so you must have traveled far. Is that where you're from?"

"That's because there isn't," Luz answered, smirking at him over her shoulder. "Kilkenny is in Ireland."

This took Nick by surprise. There's no way. No way that she crossed the ocean to come to Boston. Something so monumental would not have remained hidden from the public! Heck, for all their secrecy, even the Institute was a known factor.

A boogeyman factor, for sure, but still known to some extent.

"I lived there for a bit," Robyn provided, unaware of Nick's thoughts. "Not anymore."

"I'm starting to see that," Nick said, keeping his thoughts to himself. "As impossible as it sounds."

"Nothing is impossible!" Luz declared, raising a fist valiantly into the air just a second before the wall next to her exploded.

She dove down, rolling to a stop next to Nick and Robyn, who had taken cover behind a barrier made of several collapsed buildings. "It's the green guys!"

"Super Mutants?!" Nick asked, worry creeping into his voice. Raiders would have been bad, but Super Mutants can take a lot of damage before going down. He glanced at the other two. Can I even protect them long enough for them to escape?

"I guess that answers your earlier question about what Merlyn had spotted," Robyn muttered, glancing carefully over her cover then crouching down.

"We kind of expected them to come back, though," Luz provided, almost conversationally. "Remember what their leader was shouting the other day? Something about 'the age of mankind is over! Now is the time for—ackgh!'' She pretended to be choking and then dead.

Robyn shook her head. "Of course I do! I just expected them to wait longer. Ever since Cromwell I haven't had anyone this eager to kill me! And I've met the krang!"

Luz patted her shoulder. "Hey, it comes with the territory, don't let it get to you." She leaned back, making a fist and smashing it against her open palm. "It's the prize of popularity, girl! Oh, yeah!"

"Popularity? Who needs that?"

"Aren't you two being a bit too reckless right now?" Nick asked, leaning around the wall to take a couple of shots at a charging super mutant bruiser. One of his bullets hit the creature's armor, and the other elicited a surprisingly whiny 'ouch' but a second later the super mutant was jumping over the wall, raising its hammer to crush him…

"Break you!" the super mutant shouted, bringing the hammer down…

Only for a pillar of ice to suddenly—and violently—crash into its chest, tossing the green berserker clean over twenty feet away. It landed heavily on top of a nearby metal fence and didn't move.

"Sorry! Not sorry!" Luz called over the wall.

"I'm gonna feast on your flesh, human!" came the answering call from another super mutant, along with one corner of their cover blowing into chunks and dust. 

"I got him." Robyn rose for a second the moment the bullets paused, and let loose her arrow that went straight into the creature's eye.

"There's too many of them!" Nick shouted, seeing several more start rushing towards them. Thankfully he didn't hear the tell-tale sound of a suicider running towards them. Yet. "We need to go!"

"We have backup!" Luz said, putting away a piece of chalk she had used for some sort of drawing on the wall. "Just give them a second." She tapped the drawing just as a couple of super mutants ran around their cover, raising their weapons. 

Before Nick could react, vines as thick as a grown man's trunk emerged from the wall and wrapped around the horrified mutants, covering them completely and tightening around them.

"When will they be here?" Nick shouted over another explosion, which he could now tell was caused by a super mutant carrying a missile launcher.

"We already are."

Nick blinked as a head emerged from the floor of the house. Normally, that kind of event would be accompanied by splinters, blood and severe trauma. Instead, this young lady had just… emerged from under them.

"Cool! A robot," the white-haired young woman said, staring at him.

"Synth," Nick corrected automatically, still trying to figure out what he was seeing. A hologram?

"What took you so long, Dani?" Robyn asked.

The hologram tilted her head. "Hey don't blame me. Lena and I had to get rid of Immortan Joe, Aunty Entity, and what we think is their unholy offspring. Lena stayed behind with Mehb to hunt down the last ones."

"I think they call them Raiders," Luz provided. "And they're not related."

"Thank the Omniverse for small miracles," Dani replied. "I thought they had thrown the biggest two in a cage with some pheromone gas and—"

"Ewwww! Ewww ewww! Why?!" Robyn whined.

"Well, obviously to—"

"NOT WHAT I MEANT!"

"Aww, I think it could be kinda cute!" Luz threw in.

"You would."

"Girls, might I remind you that we're in a life or death situation?" Robyn asked, pushing away the mental image while quickly rolling out of cover, shooting an arrow, and then rolling back in.

"Alright, alright," Luz said. "Let's get this over with so we can actually get to solving our little problem, okay?"

"I don't suppose we could convince this lot to give up, could we?" Robyn muttered.

The three girls stared at each other. "Nah."

"Whatever you want to do," Nick said through gritted teeth, "I suggest you do it now, I can hear a suicider coming this way!"

It had just been a matter of time, after all.

"That doesn't sound nice," Luz muttered.

"It's not! It has some kind of bomb!" yet another voice said, and this time Nick really felt like he needed to have his eyes checked, as the flying duck-girl suddenly zoomed to levitate above them. "Let's make this quick! Luz, be ready to raise a dome, Robyn, when I give the signal shoot an arrow at the knee of the green guy with the glowing bomb in his hand. Dani, heard the other three left towards the guy with the bomb!"

"Right!"

"Will do!"

"On it!"

The duck girl glanced at Nick. "Detective? You lay low."

"If you say so…" Nick shook his head, crouching behind the wall, and glancing carefully over it. Whether the flying humanoid wanted it or not, he'd give the girls support.

There wasn't much of a fight after she arrived however. The hologram girl used some shots to herd the few remaining Super Mutants towards her, while the suicider immediately noticed her and ran to her.

Large walls of dirt and concrete immediately surrounded them just as Robyn's arrow crippled the bomb-carrying mutant. The explosion collapsed the walls inward, but it had been contained, and through the molten rocks, the hologram girl, Dani, emerged again.

"Girls," Luz said after a moment. "Let me introduce you to Nick Valentine, Detective extraordinaire." She turned to Nick. "And in turn… this is Dani and Lena Shimmer."

"That's not—" Lena began, but Luz interrupted her.

"We all know it," she said. "You just need to make it official."

Dani and Lena glanced at each other.

"Do you really doubt she'd take you in?" Robyn asked.

Dani crossed her arms, but she could do little to hide the edges of her mouth forming into a smile. "Anyway, let's get going. Mebh is already waiting for us at the camp."

I don't know what I was expecting when we got to their camp, but an actually clean room in the apartment building, with painted walls, brand new chairs and table, functioning fridge and clean windows and electricity?

That was not it.

"How in the world did you girls do this?"

"Magic," Lena responde, then sat down on a couch while the others took seats around the room. There was a short, wild-looking girl there with copper-red hair that grew out of her head like a mane. She was studying Nick with an intensity that was uncomfortably familiar.

"And who are you supposed to be?" Nick finally asked.

"See?" the short girl snorted. "How can he be a detective if he can't tell the difference?"

"I thought we established that magic is not a thing here," Dani said, "give the guy a break."

At the name, Nick turned back to look at the short girl, who smiled at him. It was the smile that did it.

"Call me crazy," Nick said, "but you remind me of a certain wolf I met earlier."

"That's me!" the girl said proudly, pointing at herself with her thumb. "Mebh Óg MacTíre! I'm a Wolfwalker!"

Nick nodded. "So I see." He didn't. "In any case," he continued, turning to stare at the other girls. "Luz mentioned that you had lost something and that you needed help finding it." He glanced around. "What that might be that you can't find, I can't even imagine."

"Weeeeell," Luz spoke up, "It's not really a thing… as in a thing… it's just we don't know what she actually is."

Nick blinked. "A person?"

"I mean, what qualifies as a person, really?" Luz laughed nervously.

"Okay, you're not being helpful, Luz," Lena said. "We are looking for… a… girl."

The way she said it, it was clear that she thought calling whomever they were looking for 'girl' was a stretch. Now, if I had this conversation with a normal wastelander (as much as that word can be applied to anyone in the wasteland) I would have immediately assumed that they were judging this other person on not being human.

Could've been a synth. A mutant. A robot. Anything not human, but with this lot that didn't make sense. They had taken a look at me and barely batted an eye, and that was just to note that I'm synthetic, and I hadn't sensed any discomfort with that.

"Right," Nick nodded.

"The thing is," Mebh spoke then, "her scent… it's just gone. I can't smell her anywhere where we were… it's weird, when she's with us, I can sense her presence normally. Her scent, hear her perfectly… but as soon as she's out of sight, it's like she's not here anymore."

"She doesn't have a ghostly presence either," Dani said. "In all the time I've known her, she's just been there when she's around, and when she's gone, I can't even tell she was around."

"I've tried finding her with spells, but she's like the Isekai… you just can't cast something to pinpoint her location." She hesitated, but instead of saying anything glanced at Robyn.

"I did try tracking her, didn't I?" Robyn sighed. "But much like her scent, there was little I could do. I'm not familiar with hunting on city grounds, and there were not tracks for me to follow."

"And I did a fly-by but, no sign of her," Luz said, shrugging.

"If she's anything like you girls, I can't see her taking too long to come back here," Nick said honestly.

"Yeah, well, you see… that's the problem. It's not that she can't make her way back to us, or that we're afraid she'll be in trouble," Dani explained, rubbing her arm. "It's just that she's not supposed to be here and it could be very bad if she gets sufficiently angry before we can get her back to the Isekai."

Nick hummed. "This Isekai place, is it far?"

"Nah, it's wherever we want it to be," Luz said.

"Can't you use it to find this missing girl?"

That got a reaction of them. One of mild panic. 

"Oh, hell no!" Luz gasped. "If we go back without her we're all dead!"

"Probably worse!" Dani threw in with a shiver.

"I knew bringing her here was a bad idea, but did anyone listen?" Robyn groaned. "No. Of course you didn't."

"Hey, how could we know she'd go on her own?" Mebh asked defensively. "We were here just for one concert!"

"Girls?" Nick spoke up, drawing their attention to him. "I need you to slow down. I'll help you find her, but I need details. I have questions for you that I need answered. How did you all end up here? What concert? Why are you so worried?" He shifted in his seat. "But let's start with the most basic one: Who is this girl that's missing?"

The girls traded glances before Luz sighed. "Well, we did ask for help." She faced Nick. "She's the sister of someone that can be very, very scary. She's not someone we're supposed to take around without express permission to do so… her name is Sweetie Belle. And she might destroy the world."