As soon as Vito finished speaking, the woman that I hope was a doctor walked so close to Vito that she was breathing in his face. However, unlike what I thought she would do, the doctor observed Vito, most likely trying to figure out how a super mutant could be so humane, unlike his kin. Thankfully, before the situation become any more awkward than it was already, the sheriff interferes stopping the doctor from embarrassing their side even more than she had already done.
"Ahem, Katelyn, would you be a dear and let our …guests explain themselves?"
Katelyn looks at the man in pure disbelief before shrugging her shoulder in defeat. Whatever was between this two was defiantly something I would rather not find out.
"As I was saying, please do tell us why a super mutant and a boy are walking unarmed in the desert?"
Vito and I shared a look before we both let out a sigh, deciding that it was better to at least share a gram of truth rather than lying about the whole thing.
"Dante and his family were attacked by raiders and sadly he was the only one left alive. For some reason, those raiders didn't loot or checked the bodies. They simply shoot at them before leaving. As for me,…I was running away from NCR. You should know how they react to my kin and I'd rather avoid being held at gunpoint similar to right now, only surrounded by trigger-happy idiots."
"I see. Then that means that you took up yourself to take care of Dante?"
"Well, the kid is tough that's for sure, but despite that, he doesn't exactly have a place where he can go, so I asked him if he's willing to accompany me to my old friend's place. Thankfully the kid accepted otherwise I couldn't sleep at night knowing that I just left a kid to fend for himself in the wasteland, even if it's NCR's wasteland."
"Here you are wrong, Vito. On paper, NCR does indeed own this territory, however, the truth is that their war with the Brotherhood of steel is keeping almost all of the manpower back in California rather than sending enough soldiers here to face the Legion. Besides, I don't have to say it, especially since you seem like an old person, Vito."
"The corruption in the republic will be the end of it, I know that. Nevertheless, NCR still has quite a few battalions in the Mojave right?"
"They have more than five thousand soldiers defending their side of the river as well as the dam so yeah, they need all the hands they could get in this place if they even want to hold the dam and at the same time keep the legion at bay. Well, anyway, you and Dante are free to rest for the night and if you are in the hurry you can leave in the morning."
Before Vito could thank the sheriff, I decided to ask him for something that I wanted to try since Vito saved me from that room.
"Sir, if isn't that much trouble for you, would it be all right for me to look at some broken machinery? Like electrical tools, weapons, and things like that."
The man looked at me in surprise before he smiled at me.
"You are mechanic kiddo?"
"Not exactly a mechanic, sir, but I do have a hobby of repair stuff."
"Well, kid, if you are half as good as I hope you are, then I willing to pay you for your services if that gets us a few things repaired around the settlement. Mechanics are hard to come by these days."
"Then, sir…"
"Name's Jackson kid. You can call me that, it's better than being called sir all day."
"So be it, Jackson. Then what can you give to me to check?"
"Well, I will have one of my friends escort you to one of the empty houses and in an hour or so, I would send someone to bring a few things to you. Hopefully, by the end of the day, you would earn yourself your first paycheck."
After he said that, one of his men, probably another man of the law told us to follow him. The man led us to a rather good-looking house before he told us to make ourselves comfortable. For some reason, the people living in this town were exactly hostile to strangers then again, they seem to be the only settlement around these parts and the next stop was the Mojave Outpost. No doubt, a lot of people are coming here to rest before going through the outpost.
As I was lying on the sofa, I heard Vito calling my name from across the room.
"Dante, I didn't think you had that kind of hobby."
"To tell you the truth, I don't. However, I'm really curious about how this experiment works and what I can do with it. "
"Did that doctor say anything about it or I killed him before he could start his evil monologue?"
"You killed him before, but from what I felt before he put the collar on my neck, my new power should be something related to machinery. Like some sort of field that makes me understand the machines and control them, at least that's what I think it does."
"We just have to wait and find out don't we?"
And just like that, Vito and I spent almost an entire hour talking, mostly Vito telling me about his life before the great war and how he served in some organization. He told me that his boss had named him the capo of a whole region just a few days before the war. Before Vito could continue his story, a man dragging a shopping cart walked into the house. He didn't talk or waited for that much after he brought the cart, but he did ask me if it was possible to fix a toy that his daughter was loving. While I didn't promise him that I would be able to fix it, I did tell him that I would everything in my power to at least attempt to repair that toy.
Since he wasn't exactly a fan of looking at me trying to figure out how my new power works, Vito decided to go into one of the empty rooms and sleep, leaving me alone to understand how to use my power and how to repair things with it.
By some luck, the man brought five broken electric metal sheers and while I had almost no idea how these things work, I hope that my power would give a rundown, especially since I had five test subjects to work with. Deactivating the collar, I was instantly hit by a wave of information as almost everything that could be considered machinery in a five-meter radio was being noted in my brain. Since this was basically my first time using it, I decided to push the cart away from my radios leaving the sheers behind as my first attempt to understand my power and to find a way to use it for my own benefit.
As soon as the cart left my radios, the only information that was transmitted into my head was some sort of schematic. At first, I was confused then the more the schematic gets "printed" into my mind, I realized that it was the schematic of the sheers. Almost forty-five minutes later, I found out what was wrong with these five sheers. Two of them were missing some components, one was completely fried up and the last two were simply lacking a battery.
The ones lacking a good battery were an easy fix, while the one that was fried up was a lost cause, because, without a whole factory, there was almost no way someone could repair this kind of simple machinery and rather than hoping that in the future a factory would start pumping out spare components for this sheers. Because of that very reason, I decided to use whatever parts that aren't mechanical as spare parts for the sheers that had missing components. One rather interesting thing I've found while learning the schematic of the sheers was that with the help of new power, I could theoretically use the same power to disassemble one piece of machinery without even touching that machinery. The only problem was that I had close to no idea how to do that without sending all kinds of parts across the room.
After a little bit of back and forth and a lot of trial and error, almost two hours after I start working on the sheers I managed to disassemble the friend sheer successfully, and how good it felt when I saw that I managed to do it.
Unknowingly to me, my green friend had watched everything I did with a kind smile on his face, similar to how a father would look at his son scoring a goal.
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