Asami's heart pounded in her chest as she watched a thick plume of smoke rise high into the sky, and on her cheeks she could feel the intense heat of the fire.
Distantly, Asami could hear the relief efforts going on, people fighting the fire with a hose tapped into a fire hydrant. Every other part of her felt numb from shock.
It didn't make sense, Asami thought to herself.
How did it make any sense to destroy critical reserves of food, water, medicine, and fuel? How could anyone justify it? How could the very same people that hated her for necessary rationing of supplies then go around and destroy those supplies… and then blame her for a tightening of rationing?
All of it had been kept in a secure building and it had went up like a dry twig.
She stood in the street across where a good tenth of where their supplies had been, a distribution point.
Where they would give food. Clean water. Where they were teaching people how to create water purifiers that could clean irradiated water -- designs taken from the New World, as Heartless called it. Where they were creating the anti-radiation drugs to give away.
"This is madness," Asami breathed before her gaze drifted away from the burning building.
No other word could encapsulate what this was as her gaze fell to a blockade that was set up. Soldiers maintaining a perimeter against a roaring crowd.
Hundreds of filthy people, thousands even, that seemed to be pouring out of the safe houses that she had established. Yet, over the sounds of people fighting the fire, Asami heard their chant.
"Death to tyrants! Death to tyrants! Death to Asami!"
She watched them screaming at them- at her, until they were red in the face, spit flying from their mouths.
They couldn't be reasoned with. They were so blinded by their hate they couldn't see that there was no one fighting for their survival more than she was. That their survival was hanging by a thread, and they just kept yanking at it.
Asami heard a crack, and felt like she had been kicked in the chest.
She dropped to a knee before Golden Boy positioned himself between them while Kimiko dropped down to make sure that Asami was okay. It was only then that Asami realized that she had been shot.
Her gaze dipped down to her chest, a ballistic vest over her wine red blouse.
/We need to get you out of here./ Kimiko signed at Asami, pulling her away from the scene but Asami glanced over her shoulder to see that the protesting crowd devolve into a full scale riot. They were throwing themselves at the guards, and-
"It was a trap," Asami breathed. They had burned the supplies to draw her out for an assassination attempt.
Asami found herself more angry that they would destroy valuable supplies than she was that they tried to kill her.
Whoever 'they' were. Kimiko shoved her into a car that peeled off down towards their main base. Asami looked over her shoulder, watching as the checkpoint was being overwhelmed.
Golden Boy was standing firm, but Asami knew that he didn't have it in him to burn a bunch of scared desperate people alive. And, Asami suspected, the ones that orchestrated the attack knew it too.
Frustrated tears burned in her eyes but Asami blinked them away, focusing on the task at hand.
/We need to pull reinforcements from the New World. Otherwise, we're going to lose control of the city./
/Control is already lost,/ Kimiko signed back and Asami closed her eyes. She knew that was right. Their control was tenuous at best, and every day for weeks, it had been slipping from their grasp. They couldn't suppress a full scale riot, especially if the riot spread to other sectors.
/We pull back to the Tower. We can defend that much. We may have to let the anger die out,/ Asami cursed. Either way, they would need reinforcements. And Asami found herself suspicious that this would happen once Rumi was gone.
Maybe they noticed that Rumi wasn't as active, but even that would be taking a risk. The only way they would act would be if they knew that she was gone.
Meaning someone on the inside had tipped off her would-be assassins.
Heartless? As much as Asami wanted to blame him, it didn't fit. It wasn't his style and he didn't gain anything from it, not even amusement.
She was mulling over the issue when they arrived and Asami found herself activating the Dias. It was an unscheduled open, which would delay their next shipment of supplies.
The reactor in the New World helped stabilize the energy demands, as did the wind farms and solar panels, but it meant they had gone from a portal every two weeks to a portal every week.
It was a necessary measure, Asami told herself. If something wasn't done, there wouldn't be an Old World to go back to.
Asami was greeted with the dry dusty air of Nuka-World. It was nighttime, she noticed and the usual greeters weren't there. However, she pressed onto Heartless's building that was marked with a large heart inside a circle with a slash through it.
There was a guard outside the doors, wearing the clunky mechanical armor that had been found on this world. Power armor.
"I need to speak to Robin."
Robin and Cinder were in charge, and Asami was loathe to speak to Cinder, even in the most dire of circumstances.
"Boss Lady is inside," the man said, letting her in. He must have made a note the moment that he saw her because a pretty young woman with a bomb around her neck was there to greet her.
"This way, please," She smiled and Asami felt her stomach clenched at the sight of the collar.
Damn Cinder, Asami thought, and not for the first time. And damn herself for being unable to argue against Heartless. Because, he had been right. Even with the vile act, they still weren't able to produce enough to feed millions of people.
The woman led her into an elevator, but they stopped too early to arrive at the penthouse. No, instead they arrived at the floor that was reserved for VIPs.
If her stomach clenched before, then it was doing flips now. The stench of sweat and sex greeted her but Asami kept her expression blank, even as she stepped into the den of debauchery.
There were dozens of people around that Asami could recognize. They were the ones that had been taken to do the runs on her side of the portal. It had started off with a few, but it had rapidly increased in scale.
Another issue to worry about, Asami thought -- if her side of the portal faltered, then the New World was going to suffer supply shortages.
Supplies vital to turning the wasteland into a place that could support millions of people.
They walked by people passed out in lounge chairs, a clip on their finger monitoring their vitals as they injected, inhaled, and swallowed every drug Asami could think of.
She saw cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, molly, painkillers, and New World drugs like jet.
To say nothing of the alcohol. The guide took her deeper into the den, and Asami found where the stench of sex was coming from with the opening of a door marked with Law's name.
His personal room?
A dozen women were in the room behind it, and she saw some of them huffing a pinkish smoke. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw two familiar faces -- Cait, and Piper.
Both were naked, with Piper bouncing in the lap of Cait, riding a dildo while Cait smacked her on the ass with one hand before taking a inhale of more pink smoke with the other.
At the other end of the room she saw Victoria Neumann, the disgraced President and Stan Edgar's secret daughter figure bent over an footstool, huffing pink smoke like it was oxygen in an airless room while an attractive Asian woman Asami didn't know thrust down into her from behind, with a woman Asami barely recognized as A-Train's former girlfriend Popclaw laying on her back getting spit-roasted by a pair of women wearing strap-ons nearby.
And at the center of it all was Robin, who had a clipboard in hand, appearing almost bored of her surroundings, her attention focused on a bloodstain on the floor. Had there been a fight?
"Has it finally happened?" Robin questioned, not even looking back at Asami.
She worked her jaw for a moment, putting the stench of sex, the constant feminine moans and the walls lined with drugs, whips, chains, and sex toys out of her mind.
"We're on the brink. We have a full scale riot on our hands. We need reinforcements."
"They'll do little good. The core reason for the riots is still there," Robin said, turning around and Asami had to wonder how a woman as beautiful as Robin ended up with a monster like Law.
"Even if we give them food, water, and medicine -- they'll still be angry. They know there is another world that they can escape into, and it doesn't matter what we tell them. They'll believe this place is a paradise and they'll hate us for keeping them out."
Her tone was clinical and uncaring. As if meant nothing that millions of people were going to destroy their only hope of survival out of imagined spite.
"Then we migrate. How many can Nuka-World handle?"
"We're over capacity by a hundred and twenty percent," Robin stated and Asami knew that. She knew it in her bones. She had poured over the numbers as much as Robin had, if not more. There just wasn't enough food and water. At least in the Old World, there was still mass scavenging that could be done.
"It'll be a month before the expansions will be properly set up, and that's for the people we already have."
"I-" Asami began, frustration welling up in her chest.
"Then what?" What was the plan? She wanted someone to tell her because she had wracked her brain for months, and everything she came up with…
"Asami. You already know the plan," Robin informed, her tone not unkind and Asami looked away.
An invasion of the Commonwealth. They would take and secure settlements, forcing them to accept their people if not outright exiling people from their own homes. All in the name of resources.
Robin approached, laying one hand on her shoulder and giving it a gentle squeeze.
"Sometimes you are presented with choices that you hate, but you can't refuse to choose. In that time, pick the option that you think you can live with." It was more than what she expected, if Asami was being perfectly honest, but she was left in a daze as Robin left her behind.
Asami looked at the women around her, all of them so high out of their minds that they probably had no idea what was going on. And she had to admit, that sounded appealing at the moment.
Instead, Asami left the building and wandered to the dried up riverbed that was meant to flow under a bridge. Her mind was racing, pouring over alternatives that could create the ideal scenario.
No invasion. No mass death. No starvation. No riots. But, from where she stood, she only saw death. It was just a matter of on what scale.
"He's going to win," Asami breathed, so exhausted she couldn't even cry.
Heartless was going to win. He was going to take over the Commonwealth. He was going to use that evil bitch to enslave it.
Enslave the people that would survive under his non-existent mercies. And then he was going to move on.
He was going to use her creation, her Dias, to spread across the multiverse like a plague.
And she helped him. She called him a necessary evil to get herself home. She wanted to go home so badly that she willingly turned a blind eye to everything he had done and worked with him. The shame was almost too much to take-
"He doesn't have to," Asami heard from below, making her flinch before looking down. There, she saw a floating eye-bot, a round ball with a few antennas. The voice that spoke was a masculine one.
"I have been keeping a close eye on you, and I know that you are no ally of the fiend Heartless and his associate, the Antagonizer." What?
Asami blinked, her mouth suddenly dry. "Who are you?"
"I'm the Mechanist… and I'm here to help!"