Jess walked over to the old animatronic and the sensors in it picked up on her and the whole thing moved to janky life. The neck of the thing didn't work anymore so it's head hung limply while a single eye opened and stared at Jess as the jaws began to move with the speech.
"Howdy pardner! Welcome to the headquarters of the Sunset Sarsaparilla company. Wrangle up a stool and listen to Ol' Festus jaw awhile." The bot said.
"Pleased to meetcha." I spoke up with a grin.
"New in town pardner? Well, let ol' Festus give you the lay of the land. If you're here to redeem your Sunset Sarsaparilla Stars, dump em into the slot in the barrel below and I'll count em up. If you don't know what Sunset Sarsaparilla Stars are and think Ol' Festus is just shooting his mouth off say "Star info". If you're here to challenge ol' Festus to a game of Lucky horseshoes, say "I feel lucky". Lastly if you're here about the health advisory that aired on channel six recently say "silly ol advisory"." the bot said while Jess glared at me.
"I feel lucky." Jess said and Festus explained the rules of the game.
It was basically just a variation of blackjack where aces are worth one point and the cards only went from two to ten otherwise, no high cards. If both players tied the other player got bumped up by one so even if you reached twenty one you could still lose if the other player tied with you on their next turn instead of over shooting it. A deceptively simple game but one that favored Festus as the dealer more often than not since if you hit twenty one he could bump you up to twenty two and win.-
Jess played a few rounds with the bot and lost about half of them by either going over the twenty one limit or getting further from it than Festus was. She did win a couple times though that paid out a smattering of caps. Barely enough for a meal honestly but considering you didn't have to pay anything to play I was surprised there wasn't a line out the door of people wanting to play a game where you technically didn't have anything to lose and a lot to win.-
"I'm done." Jess eventually said once she got bored playing the game.
"Had fun?" I asked with a chuckle.
"Yes actually. Would have been nice to know the game is rigged though." she said with a huff.
"Technically it's not. The rules apply to both sides it's just that they favor the dealer as they can bump up your number by one if they tie you." I said with a shrug.
"I'm all for games of chance but where is this laser pistol at?" Veronica asked impatiently.
I point to the door over at the back of the room to the left.
"Over behind that. Theres a collapse that has the area blocked off that we need to dig through first and then a door we have to bust down but the dead guy is through there. That room also has about two thousand or so caps in it." I said calmly as I walked over to to rough decayed wooden door at the back and punched through it.
Using the superhuman strength the armor gave me I tore the door off entirely bypassing the lock on it and then began to dig through the rubble blocking the way forward.
"So that's why you said this would keep us busy for a few hours. We have to dig our way through this collapsed part first." Jess said with understanding.
"Yep now help me by grabbing the stuff I gouge out and moving it somewhere else so it doesn't clutter the area." I said without looking back as I dug through the concrete and rebar.
The two women shared a look while Boone wasted no time at all getting to work. They did help out and with all four, five if you count Adam, of us working together I cleared out the building debris in a span of two hours. From there we walked forward maybe fifteen feet following the rest of the uncollapsed hallway that STILL had power somehow and reached the large red electronically locked metal double doors.-
"Open fucking sesame." I said with a grin as I straightened my fingers and began to forced them into the seam between the doors with an intense metallic screeching.
Once I had a good position I started to pull the doors apart and the steel groaned as it forcibly bent under the force I was exerting on it. Soon enough the electronic lock couldn't handle it anymore and shattered sending the doors slamming open.-
"Welcome to the treasure room. These crates have caps in them and the dead guy with the gun is back there in the corner. Lets get to collecting." I said grandly.
"Are we just going to ignore the fact you just ripped open a steel set of maglock doors?" Veronica asked seriously.
"I don't see how that's all that interesting since I did say I could crush a set of power armor like it was a tin can. Did you think I was bluffing?" I said with a chuckle.
"Yes! Power armor is like HUGE and it doesn't allow the sort of stuff you just did, not even close." she said seriously.
"This armor is the product of over two hundred years of experimentation by an A.I with free reign over the project and a surprisingly large amount of resources. It being WAY better than standard power armors only makes sense." I pointed out casually.
She opened her mouth to argue but shut soon after when she understood I was right. One of the biggest problems with any super long term development project was that the ones working on it typically didn't live long enough to see it complete.-
As an A.I Adam did not have that problem. Even better it also didn't even have the troubles a human mind would with maintaining focus, sleep and the need for breaks. To put it bluntly Adam even if it only thought at the same level as the average scientist, which it definitely didn't, was nearly two hundred percent more efficient at performing research and development. Over two hundred years of that all focused on refining a single suit of power armor and you can imagine the sort of progress that could be made.