Pain.
That's what I was feeling.
The pain of a surgery that had drained my body of all it's energy. A pain that told me I hadn't had a sip of water for at least a day. My skin tingled like a sunburn was almost gone. My eyelids had crust enough to feel and my nose had tubes in it. My body felt weak. So weak I couldn't move and could barely breathe.
And my head; I'd had migraines in the past and some had been bad enough to force tears out and keep me in bed for a couple of days, but this migraine was worse than anything I had ever experienced. Just accessing my pain had flared my mind so bad that I tensed up and caused more pain in my body.
I could barely feel anything but my aching body and a warm wet trickle of liquid spreading on my chest. I instinctively knew it was blood from both the pain and the feeling of it leaking. I was bleeding from my chest and probably dying and I didn't want that. I had to stop the bleeding so I didn't die.
Pushing through the pain I reached up with my dominant hand, my strongest one.
Then a thought occurred to my addled mind: which arm is dominant?
Another flare of pain cut off that line of thinking and brought me to what my hand felt. Blood was of course what I was feeling but it was through some kind of cloth. It was thick and padded and was probably the reason I wasn't dead from blood lose already.
Someone had patched me up slightly but my tension from earlier had undone something and I was bleeding out. Flopping my arm back down I hit something solid and reached up to feel it. A wall at my side: I could use this. With all the physical strength I had I slapped the wall. CRACK!
That was a good idea to get the attention of whoever had helped me, but it was horrible for me as my ears were terribly sensitive and probably damaged. The wet slap of my blood smeared hand deafened me and flared my migraine near my limit. My mind nearly stopped and over a period I barely comprehended a needle or two poking into me.
14 hours later
I woke. Dreams had been fucking with me for a bit and I only just stopped them and started noticing the nasty ache seeping into my existence. My migraine was gone but a headache had lodged itself into the back of my head. I felt my dust dry lips and mouth along with my sticky nearly dry throat. My stomach made itself known with a sinking weight that made me want to dry heave.
My body was no longer just pain. It was still mostly pain but I could at least feel what I was doing and comprehend it. I could even hear some things to my left but they were garbled and mostly unintelligible. One of the things I made out was a voice but it's words were gibberish and to low to pick up.
Deciding that it was for the best I simply turned off my thoughts and willed myself to sleep, a technique I had perfected even before my shitty days in the army.
5 hours later
More conscious, just great. The pain was still there but had dulled its blade on me. The headache was ignorable at this point but I still couldn't move, and my sense of touch told me why. My left arm was in a cast along with my legs. Most of my body had some kind of wrapping around it and my right hand was now tied down with a thick cloth.
If I had my strength I could have torn the cloth but I still felt extremely weak and even felt small compared to the bed I could feel beneath me. In my left arm I could feel two or three needles in the crook of my elbow with cotton and tape holding them tight and secure.
After some painful squirming I got my back more comfortable and forced myself back into sleep.
8 days later
I don't know how long it's been, I've lied here one limb tied down and the rest immobilized by splints or casts. Some of the bandages had been removed and I could feel slow and slightly cool air brush patches of new skin. My skin no longer tingled from a sunburn I didn't know I had and most of the pain had become flickering phantoms.
My mouth and throat were no longer dry as someone had given me a wet sponge and I had nearly eaten it. The water was a flood of cold holy lubricant freeing me from dehydration. After my drink there was a lot of shuffling and movement but I remained still the rest of the day.
7 hours later
Movement. I could move. The cloth tethering my right arm was gone and my other limbs were free if still incredibly sore and weak. Reaching up I found that my head had some things I hadn't felt previously. I had some kind of goggles like things over my eyes and my head was covered in bandages that were all slightly moist.
I tried to sit up but was startled by hands coming to my back and chest to help me do so and ease my movements. I felt the hands leave then put something behind me. The hands came back and eased me backwards to some pillows. I leaned into the pillows till a wet sponge was pressed to my lips. I nearly bit through it as I practically tore it from the hand it was in and bit down like a vampire who hadn't had a drop of blood in weeks. Or a drug addict biting into an edible after months of sobriety.
A few minutes of chewing and soaking my chest later I let the sponge drop and slowly reached up to the thing on my face. Suddenly my hand is grabbed as a slightly familiar voice speaks "None of that now boy, that stays on till I'm sure your eyes are healed." With those words he released me and I once again forced myself to sleep.
4 days later
More time passed, more sponges nearly shredded by my ravenous maw. The man had even begun bringing me real food. The food was on a soft rubber covered spoon as it had the consistency of apple sauce. It tasted like apple but definitely had something like plum or berry added. It was my first real food since waking and I had devoured it to the last bite and then nearly puked from not eating for so long.
The still familiar voice had told me I could now start drinking my water from a bottle with a straw on my own and I choked myself drinking it multiple times. Most of my pain had faded but I still had bandages all over me and was still blind from the doohickey over my eyes. I found that my body was smaller than it ever had been and it wasn't just that I had been emaciated, I was genuinely smaller than I should've been.
I was James Ellery Faber and I certainly shouldn't be this small. I had been 6,2 and ripped. Now I was shaped like a young teen that had never swung a baseball bat or dug a hole. I was puny. My pretentious family prided itself on being old. We could trace our line back to a Roman armor smith. We had a small tech empire based on extremely high quality tech and machinery. Most importantly the members of our family were not small people.
We had somehow had two members with gigantism and had produced multiple basketball stars in more recent history. I had stacked in muscle in the army by constantly working out and hauling around the bigger guns a man could wield. I was practically a baby compared to then.
If I could I would have flopped backward onto my pillows but my body was barely strong enough to move away from them. I was tired of this. Thinkingfor to long while in this state would probably be bad as my mood was dropping so more sleep it is.
6 days later
The doc had removed most of the bandages and had started giving me solid foods. He had also explained some things to me. I had nearly died, multiple times. He had barely kept me alive in time for his medical shipment to arrive and had had to split his focus between me and many others. I was in a different world; a world I knew. Fallout.
The Post-Apocalyptic Role Playing Game.
I had somehow ended up in this world as a teenager living in Sloan. My father had been the head mechanic for the quarry and had died to the deathclaws that moved in. I, like many others had been in the mine that day and fled back to Sloan. My father had the controls of the few bits there and along with a few others sacrificed themselves to hold of the beasts till people escaped.
They had been shredded and the terrifying creatures had chased us back to Sloan were they NCR troops had opened fire. The fools were all led a an even bigger fool and had ordered heavy weapons to be used. I and a few others survived and the Sloan residents wrapped our wounds and hastily dragged us to doc Mitchell in Goodsprings.
I had been in the worst condition but due to my father the miners of the group had the doc focus on me. I had survived and the doc to me in. I had three gunshot wounds and multiple shrapnel wounds. Many bones had been broken and organs had ruptured. An emergency super-stimpack was administered in Sloan and the doc had given me a normal one along with some in a slow drip IV.
Alongside the broken body were extreme burns from an incinerator and small laser burns from a laser turrets firing past me. My eyes were nearly destroyed by the lasers and had been a large concern for the doc as he had only checked them a few times as he had apparently only worked with eyes and their healing process a few times before.
3 days later
A little over a month in bed. That was how long it took for me to be in decent enough condition to move. A little over a month to heal from wounds that should have ended this life. Horrid wounds, extreme burns, and ruptured organs, and it had only take a bit more than a month to recover enough to move. On top of all that I was a teenager, around 13 years old and yet I had nearly recovered from death.
This world was insane. One super-stimpack and to normal stimpack along with decent medical care was all it took to slug death in the face and bring me back to the living world.
Why was I in this terrible, awful, yet wonderful world. Why had I gotten a second chance? I didn't want the answer, not because I didn't care but because I didn't need it. I now had a second chance and I was going to do something with it.
4 day later
Four days. The doc had me rest for four more days before removing the things protecting my eyes. He had turned off the lights and instructed me to lightly close my eyes and only open them when he gave the go ahead. In my first few days awake I had been able to open my eyes after doc Mitchell had cleaned them in my sleep, but doc had left the blinders on.
My eyelids were clearly newly grown from the miraculous stimpacks and still weak like the rest of me. When I opened my eyes everything was blurry, dark, and unfocused. The little bit of light in the room was a sharp glare stabbing into my eyes as I squinted and steadied myself from a wave of dizziness.
Doc Mitchell was hard to see sitting infront of me as the light highlighted his form and his white and gray hair. His dark skin and my near blindness blurred his skin and the rest of the room together, separated by his outline from the small light in the room.
I was suddenly blinded by a light flickering on beside his head and closed my eyes and waited till they adjusted before looking back. He wordlessly put a device to my eye and leaned in to inspect my eye. He did this for a few minutes looking at as much of my eyes as he could. Afterwards he handed me a pair of sunglasses and as I put them on he turned on lights in the room.
A few minutes later he removed the glasses and put in eyedrops and had me go to sleep.
5 days later
It was five days later that I could see without pain or discomfort and I could even look outside if I had sunglasses on. He gave me eye drops every couple hours to help with my eyes healing and adjusting. Every chance I got I would test my vision by looking out the window at the town of Goodsprings below us or by reading any book I could grab.
This world was similar yet vastly different from my previous and I intended to figure it out. Lots of what I learned here made nearly no sense to what I knew from my previous world. Most books doc Mitchell had were random pre-war books but many were medical and technology texts. Most med books were about common health issues, biology, and surgery: and were similar to what I already knew.
The technology books however were strange. Small nearly insignificant differences piled up to form sciences that would be weak theory's in my previous world. The science backing multiple types of tech in this world made it seem more like fantasy. One of the more advanced books had some details about how a fusion core worked and the stuff in it seemed like pseudo science and big keywords.
7 days later
It took my eyes around a week to stop blurring or hurting from strong light and I had even walked the town with the doc and a cane to support me. The doc had introduced me to multiple people around town and had brought up my future after we sat at Trudys.
We discussed the topic for a few hours and with advice from multiple people and Trudy I decided to learn robotics and us that the survive.
Apparently one of the burnt houses in game was a town storage of sorts and had stuff I would probably need for learning and survival. One room was a library and I practically holed up in it for a few days while using junk in there to tinker and help me learn.
After a week of studying and leeching off of doc Mitchell I finally had a plan. I was going to take over the old school building and use scrap and junk from the town to build a bot to collect more scrap for more bots. I wanted to eventually start selling bots and making more advanced tech. With a basic plan I got to work on more study of fallout science.
Save
[Yes/No]
Yes
Game Saving
(Please Stand By)